Bitcoin Forum

Very simply, they do NOT want on-chain scaling. In their own words, "segwit IS a compromise". We can only interpret that to mean a compromise between sensible scaling and NO on-chain scaling, which is in fact what they secretly want!

They want Bitcoin to be a settlement network, but do not have the honesty to admit this.  (https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/69oxoa/rodger_ver_admits_unlimited_block_size_could/dh8csps/)

They cannot honestly and openly admit "yes we want to change Bitcoin from Satoshi's peer to peer cash into a settlement network" because it would be so radical that it would have a high probability of getting backlash from the community. Therefore, they have opted to be sneaky about it.

Because they want bitcoin to be a settlement network, the impasse is fine with them, perhaps even better than segwit.

Segwit represents a tiny amount of on-chain scaling designed to make it APPEAR that Core is willing to offer on-chain scaling, yet designed in a way that it will not even activate (95% consensus), and even if it does, it would be years later than appropriate.

Segwit IS their compromise. Ideally, for them, no on chain scaling occurs.

To summarize: There is no need to compromise further because no change works in their favor.
 

The Lightning Network can take a huge amount of transactions largely offchain.  The idea of having all transactions fully onchain is not a matter of principle, it's a matter of control from miners so that they can receive transaction fees more often.  SegWit allows a slight increase in onchain capacity which is enough for the short term while this offchain scaling can also be implemented.

How do you maintain the promise of so called "peer to peer cash" to scale globally without centralizing the network due huge blocks that people cannot afford to run at home, therefore not anymore peer to peer cash but peer to corporation to peer transaction? (aka what we have already in the current baking system)

Less onchain scaling doesn't have to mean that Bitcoin becomes a "settlement network".

What they'd prefer is limited onchain scaing - an amount which can be implemented without having to increase the block size.  The more you can just increase the block size at will, the less incentivised you are to implement new solutions which make the network more efficient.

Satoshi's vision was that eventually, when the network gets large, only miners need to run full nodes.   Ordinary users can use SPV clients.

As the network gets larger, running a full node will become more expensive, but please realize that:

A)  part of that cost will be offset by the natural decline in processing and bandwidth costs.

and...

B)  By that time, Bitcoin network will be so big that it will still be very decentralized even if the cost barriers to mining increase.

You can have a different opinion than Satoshi, but I find it very suspicious that those who do aren't forthright about it.  





This is what they want you to believe, but the fact they are unwilling to compromise AT ALL, even if the face of quickly rising fees, terrible congestion, and frightening losses of marketshare...should tell you something.   Actions speak louder than words.

The evolution of bitcoin scaling is not to have on-chain scaling solution. We can see other way to upgrade bitcoin network through off-chain infrastructure.

You see Coinbase is keeping bitcoins on its system. Same as Purse.io they will credit customer instantly and we don't have to pay any fees on chain.
And now imagine that Coinbase and Purse will engage in bilateral trades. If I would like to send coins to Purse, Purse will ask Coinbase, is this an address you control?
Then all we need is signed message from Coinbase (a cryptographic proof). There will be no transaction necessary on the blockchain, no fees, no wait  time, no confirmation.

I see SegWit as a first step in the right direction of building off-chain network, and compromise is not necessary.

Segwitt +side-chains are the only possible way to make Bitcoin mainstream. Some people cannot see how aswesome all those chains will be.

jonald's totally right, Segwit 4MB blocks do not change the scale of the Bitcoin network's use of resources.

But jonald's preferred plans only make that situation worse, too. He goes on and on and on about on-chain scaling, but always presents ideas (about 5 different non-scaling ideas in 2 years, and counting) that don't change the scale the Bitcoin network performs at, they just increase the capacity, at the expense of a decentralised network where the users are in control.

We can have both. We can have capacity increases, and safeguard the Bitcoin network so that regualr users are in control of the rules. Anyone would think that jonald doesn't want that, by the way he carries on ;)

Beg your pool operator overlords if you want a compromise.

malicious spammers wont use segwit keys nor will they use lightning.
they will continue to native spam the baseblock which will still distrupt segwit keys users and lightning open/close channel operations

segwit/lightning does not solve the real problems. it just pushes innocent people away from native bitcoin with hopes and utopian dreams, but no promiss/guarantee's

I'm so tired of all the propaganda. Even if the big block (BU) side could convince me it was the right thing to do (and studying both sides of the argument from an actual technical and risk standpoint failed to do that), I'm so sick of it I would side against them simply due to all the bullshit I hear from that side. You want to win people over, then do it with hard facts, data and logical reasoned debate etc. Franky I think both sides are filled with prima dona arrogant twats. I think segwit is a good idea but I also think the whole hard fork bad, let's not do 2Mb blocks is ridiculous. Taken in it's entirety, I'm "stuck" opposing big blocks and supporting what core is doing.

The resources that spammers need to pressure the network wouldn't necessarily change very much with larger blocks.  They can just send lower transaction fees for their transactions that never confirm.  Higher fees mean that spam can only take the network so far as the resources needed for it rise, and therefore solutions like LN are good for there to be low fees overall due to reuse of payment channels, and low fees for larger transactions because as a percentage those fees would still be miniature.

But we've been there, done that.   For example Gavin did actually testing on 8MB blocks 2 years ago.  And there are SIMPLE solutions to QH.  Everyone knows 2MB would be fine.  Not sure would you oppose this because you don't like certain personalities. 

Gavin is a really nice guy but I've read a lot of his stuff on here and IMO he's naive when it comes to risks. Funny cause I read a comment he made about that somewhere as apparently others have made the same observation. As I said. IMO 2Mb was a no brainer and I have an issue with  core taking a "no hard fork" stance (at least yet as they haven't taken bigger blocks off the table). But when I compare the two from a technical and risk standpoint, I'm forced to go with core. Not because I really want to but because the alternative is far less acceptable to me. And to be clear, I really don't like certain personalities on either side.

And I know you like to bring out Satoshi as if he was an all seeing all knowing deity that foresaw where things would be decades from the time he created bitcoin. But his short little 1 line comments about some of these large issues forces me to question whether he really gave them the sort of serious thought they apparently needed. At the end of the day, much has changed and we don't have a clue what he might think or do now. Anyone pulling out those old one liners as some sort of "proof" is simply trying to use him to suit their agenda.

But even if I didn't really agree with Satoshi, i would still likely think the core team needs to bend more from their roadmap since 2mb is entirely reasonable, the miners aren't agreeing to "segwit only" and the impasse is damaging Bitcoin. (Yet, core doesn't seem to care and in fact is happy with this.  That was my point.)

Whose favor are we talking about exactly?

https://i.imgur.com/i9w2sB3.png

---

Stop quoting Satoshi out of context to please your shilling overlords. ::)

"Everyone" is damaging Bitcoin. Core, Ver (BU), Jihan, "you". Playing the blame game is damaging. Saying only one side is at fault is damaging. As for "miners", as far as I can see it has nothing to do with segwit only but because maxwell pissed them off. They activated segwit on LTC just on the "promise" of a bigger block size once they get half full (I predict LTC will magically get to half full far quicker than it should). So it looks to me like it's all just out of spite now. As for core, last I heard the "plan" was something like segwit, LN and if it's still needed a block size increase. As I said, I think not doing hard forks while bitcoin is still "young" and learning lessons from doing them is foolish. So IMO a 2Mb change would have been a good idea for a variety of reasons. But we are where we're at and everyone is entrenching. I see it ending very badly for all of us users that just want to move forward.

Forget about "satoshis" vision and focus on the facts.

Fact: If you raise the blocksize up to a point where people can't run their own nodes, you cannot call it a peer to peer network anymore.

No amount of tricks can overcome the importance of a full validating node, so forget about SPV. The moment people can't have full validating nodes the whole concept of "peer to peer cash" it's game over.

Fact: Technology is not going to catch up with the huge blocksizes we would need, not in terms of storage and not in terms of bandwith. Mainstream level transaction onchain will always be ahead of the curve when it comes to running full validating nodes, which means mainstream level transactions are impossible onchain without a centralized network where corporations run the nodes.

If satoshi wanted datacenters to run full nodes then he was objectively wrong in calling his project a peer to peer cash network because it's not peer to peer and certainly not cash.

Miners not signaling a scaling preference are also to blame, I would agree with that.   I don't blame either Bitfury or Bitmain -- they are at least signaling what they perceive to be the best solution.  How are investors  to blame for trying to make logical arguments about what is happening?


Bitcoin core devs Would agree to a similar agreement?  Very doubtful.




Yes, that's their roadmap, but who decides when "if its needed"?  Greg?  He'll never say its needed.  If they can't agree we already need it badly right now, I don't see why there would be any logical explanation for them to act reasonably in the future.


Could be.   I hope it doesn't end bad as I'm a hodler.   Maybe there will be a network split.  Who knows.

But why?  What's wrong with SPV and fraud proofs for my own transactions?   Why do I need to validate the entire blockchain ?

You're wrong because off-chain transactions are against the nature of Bitcoin and Satoshi vision. All transactions must be ON CHAIN due to many reasons, technology is not in cause here. The decentralization model should also be for Core Dev we have to rethink the process of BIP proposal and reward Dev for it.


For exemple Bitgo Instant is great tool and might be considerated as Off-chain transactions network. You don't need a solution On the network but Off the network it's called business man

How do you know that's what they're doing? Are you on the inside hearing all the internal discussions/plans so you can state that for a certainty? I'm certainly highly skeptical as to that being their reason from the information I see.

If you're refering to yourself as the investor making logical arguments, I've been reading a lot of your stuff the last couple weeks and I'm sorry, but you're clearly not "just" some lowly investor lol.

I have no bloody idea what they're thinking. The HK thing was a clusterfuck and as far as I'm concerned the real reason we're where we are despite all the supposed altruistic reasons some people like to promote.



Until segwit and LN are working AND people stop playing games with the network, we won't know whether it's needed or not at that point. Please don't try and tell me it's badly needed now given the "Shenanigans" going on. As for Greg, I think he's a very talented developer and very bright when it comes to that (although his view on bitcoin prior to coming on board was funny), but that's all he should do.


Could happen. When "Man" tries to gain control over something, they tend to end up destroying it. They often think they know when to stop but often momentum takes over and it's too late. History shows that time and again. So with the way things are going it's a possibility here.

They are signaling for segwit or BU because they thats what they want.  Why else would they?  I'm always up for a good conspiarcy theory.



and a guy that likes to post a lot?  Not sure what you're saying.
 
What games and shenanigans?   Look at the all time chart for avg. blocksize.  Look at the bitcoin market dominance chart, and the median fee chart.  If you don't have a sense of urgency, I don't know what to say.   If you agree "that's all Greg should do" (develop), then why do you seem to be ok with him setting economic policies by calling for full blocks and a fee market? 
 

Almost 6 months ago, when the number of transactions etc was a lot lower than it is now, Segwit was released which, if it was activated so it could be used, would alleviate some of the issue. It would allow LN to be implemented (both litecoin and vertcoin have performed real transactions on their mainnets using LN already). For 6 months it's been in the hands of the miners. They're the ones that have been in the position to determine whether bitcoin explodes or not since it's their voting that makes the decision. Until the outcome is decided, there's nothing to do and assuming they continue to block it, that's almost 6 month away. What I don't get frankly is that as far as I see, the vast majority of users/businesses want segwit activated. So why aren't the miners doing it?

I'm sorry, but if you think you can convince me that core would be to blame at that point you're sadly mistaken. There's plenty of blame to go around but as things stand right now, failure of bitcoin will be due to the miners as they could just suck it up and activate segwit. There are plenty more battles to be fought over all this stuff.


I wasn't aware that he unilaterally decided what code ended up being released. As far as I'm aware it's the actual bitcoin developers that decide and he isn't one any more.

As far as the "fee market", that's controlled by the miners and always will be. The intent was always that as mining rewards decreased miners would get more out of fees. So higher fees to replace block rewards is just the natural progression of bitcoin over time.

He is the author of the core roadmap and one of the key "deciders", yes.  He recently gave up github commit access so the Blockstream conflict of interest wouldn't be quite as glaring.


A market is made of supply and demand.  By deciding the supply (1 meg per block), a fee market is created.  This is admitted.

get the "gigabytes by midnight" script out of your head. the rises of blocksize can grow at a natural progressive rate that nodes can cope with.
core already admit 8mb is safe..
with all the code efficiencies since 2009 (libsecp256k1=5x efficient for instance),
the fact that we are not average homeline of 512mbit/s(38mbyte/10min) ADSL, but alot more as an average now
the fact that hard drives ar cheaper
the fact that the baseline raspberry Pi is now raspberrypi3

all show that 8mb is safe and admitted as such, but even so just going to 4mb is also ok. with a few tweaks ONTOP to further becoming extra safe such as limiting txsigops to 4k per tx or less forever...
all would show that there is nothing technically hindering the ability to run a full node at home



and i now hope you see why the whole filters(gmaxbuzz) bridging(lukeJrbuzz) to create a cesspit of a TIER network by going soft is something i have hate of.

Yes this is correct. I commented on this in another related thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1847331.msg19009361#msg19009361 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1847331.msg19009361#msg19009361)

I'm glad they don't compromise, that makes bitcoin decentralized and very reliable. If they succumb to pressure of some Chinese monopolists Bitcoin will be in great danger.

I'm amazed that this point is repeated over and over, and I've been arguing, demonstrating, proving.... that there's no *power* to be had in running a full node that is not a mining node.  There is *information* to be had when running a full node: indeed, if you want to *verify yourself* what the system is doing *but without any means to act on it*, you can run a full node.  But that's informational, and is not a matter of power.

I'm amazed that people always put forward the "decentralization aspect" of full nodes, while Satoshi himself explained from the very beginning:
1) that the consensus system is Proof of Work, especially to avoid "proof of node" simply because that would be open to Sybil attacks, and as such, nullifying the decision power of non-mining full nodes ON PURPOSE.  PoW was introduced exactly for that !
2) that if the block chain becomes very succesfull, only people mining new coins need to run a full node, and that other users can use their light wallets to connect to them.

So, concerning the decentralization of bitcoins consensus mechanism, there's absolutely no use for non-mining full nodes.  As an individual power user, you may want to check for yourself whether bitcoin is still working how they told you it was working, and invest in a full node - but the only thing you will get out of that is *information* ; you cannot INFLUENCE bitcoin that way.

I've argued this very logical point, nobody has ever countered it, and it is fairly obvious from the writings of its creator that non-mining full nodes have no consensus power at all.

In other words, your permissionlessness, and your ability to transact peer-to-peer are totally INDEPENDENT of whether there are a lot of non-mining full nodes or not, because ALL THAT is decided by the consensus of miners.  The protocol they agreed upon to build the block chain, is the de facto protocol of bitcoin, and they decide if they include your transaction or not.  You don't need full nodes to transmit them your transaction: if you connect DIRECTLY to their nodes, they will get it.  And that was how bitcoin was designed !  Consensus is decided by those who deliver proof of work and explicitly NOT by the number of full nodes.

It is rather strange that one argues that the peer-to-peer ability to pay is compromised because Joe cannot run his full node in his basement any more (while this node never intervened in any consensus decision). but that the peer-to-peer ability would NOT be compromised by needing a lot of hubs in the LN network to agree to your transaction: hubs to which you are TIED with a payment channel which you cannot settle easily (as per definition that the on chain system is "compromised" and doesn't have, per design, the capacity for you to easily settle).  Being forced off-chain looks to me like a much higher danger to the peer-to-peer permissionlessness of transactions, than having to rely on the consensus of Proof-of-work providers only.

The current, actual reality is that all of bitcoins' consensus, including the protocol, the permission to transact, the fees, and everything, are the consensus that happens between about 20 entities, the pools, that together, have more than 99% of the decision power (PoW) under their control.  The consensus that emerges between these 20 entities is what we call "bitcoin", and bitcoin was designed to be like that.  

great post QFT

Fact: if the entire consensus mechanism as it was designed, is decided by 20 entities, it is not a peer-to-peer CONSENSUS SYSTEM any more.  And that it the current reality.

Bitcoin is not about peer-to-peer communication (like, say, the Tor network).  Bitcoin is not about communication on top of the internet.  Bitcoin is about building a secured ledger of transactions according to consensus deciders, deciding what is the actual list of past transactions.  
Well, that list is about ENTIRELY decided by 20 entities.

That's bitcoin's reality.  So there's not much peer-to-peer any more.  Yes, the peer-to-peer part is between these 20 entities.  The rest is just a communication network that doesn't serve much of a purpose: whether I send my transaction through 8 hops from P2P to one of these 20 entities, or whether I send it directly with TCP/IP to them, doesn't alter much apart from some anonymity aspects, and then I can use true P2P networks such as Tor to obtain the same.

In the end, my transaction has to be accepted by one of these 20 entities, written in the unique block chain these 20 entities produce, and my counter party has to get it from them (directly, or through a proxy server-full-node) to see that my payment got accepted, confirmed, and written into the unique eternal ledger, produced by these 20 entities.

I don't see what's peer-to-peer in that system.

You have a consortium of 20 ledger-producers on one hand, and an army of customers (the users) on the other hand.

but those 20 pools can only continue to operate if they more or less play by the rules.   otherwise they will dissolve.  Is there a better KNOWN system than Bitcoin (other than some unknown one someone is working on behind the scenes),

Which, sadly, implies it's a failure. "The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.". Course one could "argue" about what the definition of "attacker" is but it is what it is at this point.

This is like in any industry: you have the main industries, like the car manufacturers (the pools), you have the subcontractors (the owners of mining hardware) who do in fact most of the manufacturing work, and you have the customers paying for the joke (the users, buying and selling bitcoins).

The specificity of this industry is that the product is a unique global product: the block chain, and not individual products you can buy from pool A or from pool B.  They are building one single big bridge, say, and not many independent cars.  This is what keeps the immutable rules in place: no-one can start deviating from the rules, because his pieces wouldn't be accepted by the peers, and he would lose all of his production.

Bitcoin remains immutable as long as these 20 entities (well, 5 would be sufficient in bitcoin's case) don't sit in a single room and decide something together.  They are bound to remain with the only rule set on which they have de facto agreement: the actual rules, until they can sit together and invent something more lucrative for them.  More lucrative also means: not scare away all customers.

I think it is quite clear what an attacker is in bitcoin's case: it is an entity wanting to modify the published consensus history.
In other words, a miner building on top of the chain is never an attacker (a miner orphaning the last block isn't, either).  Someone trying to overdo the last 50 blocks, however, is an attacker.
I think one could define an attacker as someone orphaning ON PURPOSE any block older than 6 confirmations.

It is here that proof of work is a terribly BAD cryptographic security.  You can't find worse.  In as much as consensus FINDING can be done with just any sufficiently fair and random way, past consensus securing should be done with better cryptographic means than proof of work.

In fact, as long as these 20 entities are not attackers, and they have never been, the system is not a failure in the sense that it allows people to transact.  But it is not a peer-to-peer system, and it does have points of failure (for instance, law enforcement intervention).  But it seems to work.  Not as it was conceived, but it works. 

As such, my idea is that given THIS deviation from the original P2P vision, the discussions concerning "full nodes in your basement" are after the battle.  The system is not a P2P system since quite a while.  So if these entities are the ones deciding on the whole bitcoin consensus, they may just as well also operate the full nodes that everyone connects to with light wallets: it won't change the power structure of bitcoin's industry.

I do agree, given what we now know for a certainty, that the bitcoin method of using PoW for "all things" is a major flaw.

As of today. But that "20" will continue to shrink until someone can control 51%. It's inevitable assuming "all things" stay the same.

Options are limited when it comes to distributed consensus obviously.  What's better?

What do you think of Byteball/DAG ? They have a 'finality' feature.

Even if someone was having 51% of the hashing power, that wouldn't mean that bitcoin was not functioning - only, we would now have a "CEO of bitcoin".  That said, the relationship is somewhat more complicated, because that 51% power is mostly outsourced to hardware owners.  There hardware owners cannot decide directly, (they only sell their hash rate), but they are part of the "block chain producing industry" and wouldn't want to see the system destroyed in which they are hardware-invested.   So even if a single pool had more than 51% of the hash rate, I don't think it would mean that bitcoin was compromised.  The day that that pool owner "goes beserk", the hardware owners might decide to jump to another pool if the jumping of the pool owner is not seen in their lucrative advantage.

There's no reason for a big pool owner to go beserk ; however, all miners (hardware owners and pool owners) will want to find the most lucrative way of running bitcoin for them, that's for sure.   My idea is that the current protocol is actually very lucrative to them. 

Transaction times are taking longer and fees are increasing.  Bitcoin started small.  I don't know what everybody's deal is with nodes.  It's so flippin' easy to run a full node, I didn't even know I was running three different ones (Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Unlimited, Litecoin and DASH).  I did notice the significant investment in purchasing mining equipment - including dedicated circuits.

If the question is about SegWit/Lighting, then read the 2004 Ripple white paper by Ryan Fugger.  

If we are talking about the purpose of Bitcoin, we should remember the context of its inception and the message encrypted in the genesis block:

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

This was probably intended to comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking and to provide people with another option:   peer-to-peer cash.  

If they really believed (Blockstream / Core Developers) in Bitcoin, they would conduct all of their business in Bitcoin.   I've got too much invested for a 20 year old, developer who lives in grandma's basement, to think s/he's an economist. If it takes two coins and a hard fork.  I was against it a few months ago and, now, I say the sooner the better.

EDIT:
Well put and insightful.  I've switched pools multiple times and even having miners on multiple pools.  Though I've recently switch them all to a BU pool because I am sick of these long confirmation times and high tx fees.

In bitcoin, and in several other crypto, one has confused several different functions, to bring them together in one single thing, and I think it is quite obvious now, with hindsight, that this was a bad idea.

The different functions that PoW has been assigned to, are these:

1) burning seigniorage for new coins.  The ability to print "money out of thin air and get its value" (seigniorage) has always seen as a bad trait of any monetary system ; in fact, it is the sole justification of "sound money doctrine", namely that NOBODY should be able to print money because of seigniorage.  The Austrian school considered gold, that came from "long ago" as an acceptable sound money, because nobody could "print" gold - and mining gold was about as costly as what it was worth.  If you make a new currency, of course you have to "print" it, and bitcoin's way of killing the seigniorage was exactly, mining with PoW: you got bitcoin's value, but you had wasted about the value you obtained in hardware and electricity.

==> this is a sensible use of PoW

2) allowing new users to compete for coins without being in the "old boys network".   PoW allows just anyone to create coins, without permission or acceptance or whatever.

==> this is a sensible use of PoW

3) consensus formation.  This is already somewhat more doubtful.  NORMALLY, all transactions that are transmitted over the network, should simply be part of the consensus, apart from double spends, in which case, one has to decide "arbitrarily" which of the two double spends, if any, should be part of the consensus.  One should also include, in the consensus, who had the right to win coins through PoW.

==> this has nothing to do with PoW a priori.  In case there's a doubt, a random, but agreed-upon decision should simply be taken.

In fact, consensus formation is almost trivial apart from double spends close in time so that they arrive in different orders at different parts of the network, which is the "hard part" to solve, but which could in fact be solved easily: if ever there is a double spend in a relatively close interval of time, the spending address is blacklisted, and the coins are lost for ever, which would be a serious disincentive to double spend.  Without double spends, the consensus formation is trivial: it is the full list of all transactions, and the order doesn't matter.

4) cryptographic securing of the consensus formation.  In as much as the consensus is "the biggest set of transactions", there's in fact not much securing to do.  It is the possibility of *excluding* transactions that needs cryptographic securing, so that nobody *excludes* old transactions.  In as much as it would be "the biggest list", no cryptographic securing is in fact needed, but if the list has special requirements, it needs to be secured once the list is accepted generally.

In fact, it is the severe consensus mechanism, to put everything in a block chain, that needs cryptographic securing, and here, PoW is really bad.  Just any digital signature scheme would be better because cryptographically more secure. The whole of bitcoin's drama comes from the fact that the PoW, which was meaningful for coin creation, was also used as a very severe consensus decision mechanism, and as a cryptographic securing of this very severs consensus decision, leading to the mining industry and the uselessness of network nodes.

This is in fact extremely ironic.  The banking crisis of 2007-2008 was NOT caused by any failure of the fiat currency system.  It was caused by reckless speculation of financial institutions on "virtual assets" which were the toxic complex derivatives, of which the backing in real economic terms was totally unfathomable by their complexity and hence became unbacked assets, and which essentially crashed, exposing these financial institutions with worthless paper.  This SPECULATION is what was at the cause of the crisis, not any quirks in the issuing of fiat money, as can be seen by the relative price stability of most fiat currency in that period.

Now, as a reaction to that, bitcoin's creator invented an asset, bitcoin, that has a severe deflationary spiral built into it, and hence is entirely designed to be a heavily speculative asset (as is observed in reality), exactly of the same kind as the kind of hollow derivatives speculation that caused the crisis.

So, bitcoin pretended to fix a problem that wasn't one (namely the pretended problem with the fiat payment system), while inventing an asset that was of the same speculative type as the stuff that DID cause the problem.

That said, bitcoin did pave the way for a "freedom currency", that would allow people to win back their economic freedom, from law, state and tax.  So the fact that a freedom currency could exist, is an interesting aspect of bitcoin.  However, in my opinion, it contains too many fatal design flaws to become such a large scale currency (if even there's a demand for it) ; but for a smaller community of people, it can have this usage on occasions even though its overall design makes it into a speculative asset.

If I understand this correctly miners can filter spams?
Why are other miners confirm the blocks containing such obvious spams and why don't they reject such blocks?

So now Jonald is Wu?

I can see BU fans are desperate enough they even beg for a SW+2MB upgrade, damn receiving double the fees and mining with ASICboost must be tasting good.


I blame Satoshi, he should've known better how does these things work, where is the copy right for bitcoin? he could've sued BU for trying to violate the copy rights.

Jajajaja ... it's totally ironic.  I think it provides people with another option.  Andreas Antonopolis told a story in an interview about how he convinced his mother to put all of her money into Bitcoin in 2011.  She finally did.  Shortly after, the government took 20% from everyone's bank accounts.  There is nothing wrong with fiat currencies, except politics, and that's also true with Bitcoin.


Do you think maybe it was to mimic gold, as some have suggested? Perhaps it was to say "DON'T PRINT MONEY TO BAIL OUT BANKS!" We'll never know [hopefully] and that's the fun part.  Probably some of both.


Yes. That is true.  I never thought about Silk Road.

It will be interesting to see where it goes.  It has a lot of benefits by being the first, but other currencies are able to adapt.  DASH has seen the Bitcoin scaling debate and built it into their Masternode.  They also have 100 DASH limit to vote.  ETH is exploring proof of stake, which is a flaw with BTC; people can say all they want without having a dime invested and it takes time to distinguish on these sites.

I don't think Bitcoin will go away.  I think it's great, but I am diversifying my portfolio (along with many others) and am mostly interested in LiteCoin and DASH.  Having said that, I think any cryptocurrency that has a public blockchain can be legitimate and competes with BTC.  If it's an internal blockchain, then, it probably has less value.  I'm thinking Ripple.

I don't think so.  I think they are just stupid computers that try to guess the answer.  If they get it right, they get a prize.


Nope. Just slowly showing more and more support for BU and less and less for Segwit: https://coin.dance/blocks  It's the high transaction fees.  If we have larger blocks, then the fees go down because more transactions are picked up per block.  Lower fees = higher quantity demanded = higher price


It helps to offset the constant difficulty increase, but the amount of BTC per hash continues to decrease.  I used to get 0.02 BTC per day and it's now down to 0.013 because of the additional hashers - even with high fees.  We need to pay bills though and often transact at least a couple times per day, so any gains from the fees are eaten up by paying higher fees.

Sure, it is another option.  That said, when government wants to take assets from people, they will always find a way, especially when the assets become "publicly accepted" (and hence also "declared"). 

But there's a difference between "freedom money" (of which I'm fond), and "sound money doctrine" (finite set of assets).   Nothing stops freedom money from having an issuing mechanism that more or less regulates its value to a constant, and hence can become a much better unit of account than an inelastic amount of assets which will always turn into speculative items, because of their volatility (and especially, if "growing", by their greater-fool potential).

In as much as bitcoin was a great idea to have a decentralized monetary token, its economic policy is very naive and bound to failure (as an ideal monetary asset), especially because it has no elasticity.


But gold never was a great money, and gold is special, because of its historical ground.  Rare stuff just becomes speculative, and when it is speculative, it has not stable value, and when it has no stable value, it is not a good unit of account, and when it is not a good unit of account, it is not a fluid currency.

Also, gold "always existed" in a certain way, and the only thing that new gold sources did, was a "gold rush" which was always an economic disaster, from the demise of the native American civilisations to the disasters elsewhere ; but gold never faced the problem of extremely severe seigniorage, making huge fortunes of a few. 


My take on it is that bitcoin will stay, of course.  But I think bitcoin has so many flaws, is based upon so many misconceptions, that it will never be what it was said it was going to be ; and bitcoin has been withholding serious crypto competition until recently, by its de facto monopoly of the market. 

That said, my idea is that most of crypto, as of this day, is heavily speculative, and that this will only get worse, not better, because almost no token has self-regulating systems, and if they are, nobody is interested in it.  Bitcoin has killed the dream of free money by being a get-amazingly-rich-quickly scheme like rarely has been seen before, and by having many imitators of that same scheme.  DASH, for instance, even amplified the deflationary spiral with its master node scheme. 

It is very easy to make a speculation-capped crypto asset, that will never fall into a deflationary spiral, but nobody would use it, because, exactly, the get-rich-quickly dream would not be included, and all the deflationary bullshit of bitcoin's monetary theory would be baffled: the simple thing to do would be to have PoW without automatic adaptation, but with a slowly rising curve.  As such, a coin would never be worth more than the economic cost of the PoW of its creation, and the monetary mass would adapt to its market value to keep it essentially constant (the rising curve would compensate for the improving technology) ; exactly like central banks do.  But nobody actually wants "internet money" - except dark markets.  People want "digital gold on steroids" to become rich quickly in a greater fool game.  My idea is that this is what kills crypto's soul, and that we're just seeing the crypto version of a huge "complex derivatives" market on which people speculate.

I understand PoW used for both insuance and consensus... still, i think its kind of pointless to say "PoW not as good as DSA".  You can't solve the double spend problem simply with digital signatures.  That's why they invented Bitcoin ;)

This is the perfect explanation that I've been too lazy to write out for people. I'm saving this to copy and paste for people.

Of course you can, it is called proof of stake (for instance).  Some call it "check points" (which is signature of the dev).  Proof of stake has a known problem which is "nothing at stake", but ONLY because one combines proof of stake also with block rewards.  Proof of stake as a non-rewarded consensus mechanism doesn't suffer from that.  

Bitcoin could not really start with *rewarded* PoS, because then Satoshi was the only one who could "stake" in the beginning, so he would be the only one receiving new coins, and the only people obtaining bitcoin would be people getting them directly from Satoshi, which would look too much like Satoshi printing an infinite amount of money that he would then sell.
However, Satoshi could have had the idea of using PoW for coin CREATION, but keeping the consensus mechanism with PoS, non-rewarded.  At that time, it probably seemed a good idea to reward people doing the consensus signature thing ; but it turned bitcoin in a "mining industry" where the users are now "external customers".  If the consensus mechanism had been based upon staking signatures (with no reward) then "miners" would only be people making new coins, but would have had nothing to say about the protocol, the block size, or whatever, which would have remained in the hands of the bitcoin owners (the stakers).
It seemed a good idea to do everything in one go, but it turns out it probably wasn't.

History seems to indicate the opposite. I remember when the pie chart was mainly 3-4 pools, and there were a few times a pool DID achieve 50%+. There are more pools today than ever, and it will keep growing.

And 8MB is shit compared to mainstream payment transactors. You will never achieve mainstream adoption onchain.

8MB right now is not safe, it's too much, nodes will drop likes flies. Im dumping my node for sure at 8MB.



Satoshi's vision was "peer to peer cash". How can you call "peer to peer cash" something that is peer to corporation running nodes to corporation running miners to peer, peer to peer cash? Get real.





Wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk7nYxTOyQ

Bitcoin will never go mainstream as payment system, that's obvious (*), so one shouldn't aim for something that will never happen.  Bitcoin is a speculative asset, it is not a currency.  Of course, it is a speculative asset that can be transmitted, and hence, can be used somewhat as a payment in those cases where normal payments don't work well (such as dark markets, bribing, murder on command, financing prohibited political activity, doing business away from taxes, and many other applications where fiat can only go with difficulty).  But it is not a stable currency that can be used as a general payment system so that's not necessary.

It only needs to carry the load of these niche payment applications, and of course, its main application, which is speculative trading.  Now, 1 MB is maybe a bit low for that, but I would be surprised if bitcoin needs orders of magnitude more for speculation transactions.  After all, they essentially serve to go to exchanges, and back to wallets.


Could you argue with text please ?  I'm sure you can give a logically constructed argument on which we can reason, instead of some or other video.  I can't reason with videos.  I watched the beginning of it, and it sounded like some rhetoric about the analogy with the internet, but rhetoric doesn't cut it.

I think my argument is quite watertight concerning the non-power of full nodes, and I've never seen a LOGICALLY ARGUMENTED rebuttal to it, that doesn't confuse full nodes with users, or doesn't confuse it with the power game of a hard fork.

(*) it is obvious because bitcoin is not a good unit of account, there's no mechanism in it that adapts the emission of bitcoin with its value with the aim to stabilize it, and bitcoiners are even proud of that.  Something that is not a good unit of account (volatile value) cannot be generally used as a currency in a payment system.

Do you understand the importance hence of a serious logical and rational (not rhetorical) argument of why these non-mining nodes are essential ?

You are going to make a decision upon restricting the use of a system, maybe based upon an argument (we need lots of non mining nodes for "decentralization") that doesn't hold water, and of which one cannot give, visibly, a strongly argumented proof ?

Bitcoin has perfect stability - it has always maintained a value of 1BTC = 1BTC.

Oh, you meant its price in USD? Why would that be relevant to its stability? You are using a very unstable currency (USD) as a measuring stick. Any currency that replaces fiat must be volatile, because it has a lot of growing to get to that point, and its not going to chart a straight line on the way.


Are you talking to us from 2005? 1MB, 8MB, 32MB...these are all insignificant amounts in today's world. To argue otherwise just ruins any credibility you may have had.

No, I mean in Big Mac of course.  How many Big Macs could you buy with 1 BTC in November last year ?  And how many big macs can you buy now with 1 BTC ?

How many Big Macs could you buy with $1000, in November ?  And right now ?

Big Macs are priced in dollars. See the difference? One is the established currency, and one is replacing an established currency. The replacer inherently CAN'T have the same pricing stability as the currency it is replacing. The former has to rise against the latter which includes against items priced in the latter.

Trying to peg a new currency to an established one is a fool's dream because it goes against non-fiat monetary fundamentals. A currency needs to grow in value organically ie. go up in price as it is adopted so that price is an indicator. Trying to rig that is no better than a fiat scheme.

No, Big Macs are priced in many currencies, and this is used to find relative over or under-evaluations of currencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

Big Macs expressed in, say, Yen, and calculated in Euro by their conversion rate, can be compared to Big Macs bought directly in Euros.

There are of course differences, which can also be partially accounted for by different *valuations* of the specific item of a Big Mac in different societies, but it gives a rather rough index of "true value of exchange".  They indicate differences on the 10-20% level or so.

Bitcoin went up from 10 000 BTC for one pizza, to about 200 pizza for 1 BTC in 7 years or so.   That's not a unit of account.  In Big Mac terms, that's 6 orders of magnitude.

It is a known economic experience that collectibles are never good units of account: it takes active steering (which can be automatic, as I said before) to keep the value of a currency more or less stable.

In fact, you can measure it in another way: if you can get genuinely rich with it by just hoarding it, it isn't a currency.  It is a speculative asset.

Of course not.  In Europe, many currencies were replaced by the Euro, and the Euro didn't "rise" against these currencies to replace them.   The Euro got more and more participants, and replaced bigger and bigger markets, as new countries adopted the Euro, but the Euro didn't "rise" against these other currencies.  

Imagine that an imaginary bitcoin was emitted at against, say, $1 in the beginning, and that it had an emission scheme to keep it around $1.  (my proposal is to have proof of work that is about $1 worth, and can do as much proof of work as you want and emit as many coins as you want with that: if you are willing to burn about a million $ worth in proof of work, you own now a million coins ; if you want to burn a billion $ worth of PoW, you now own a billion coins).  Suppose that people like it, and start using it more and more.  Slowly, it starts to replace payments about everywhere.  The extra demand for the currency, to be able to use it (Fisher's formula) would make it rise in value, but that makes it more interesting to mine it, and it costs about the value of $1 to mine it, so people will mine a lot of it until it lowers again to near $1 value.  If it is less than $1 in value, nobody will spend PoW on it to make more of them, and none get emitted.  But if more people use them, more and more coins are in circulation.  The monetary mass, the market cap rise, and they replace soon most payments.  But nobody can get rich with it.  It is a currency.  Its value is stable (the value of about $1 of proof of work).  You can write a contract in it.  You know its value will remain stable (at least, will not deflate like crazy and become a rare collector's item).

You've spent too much time arguing with dumbasses and marketroids which caused you to start believing in your own bullshit.

Almost from the inception people understood the importance of distributed node network, even if under centralized control:

1) ability for nearly anyone and relatively cheaply audit (in the accounting sense) the totality of the system.

2) distributed node architecture makes it easy and cheap to hide the actual expensive nodes (either due to mining or transacting/exchanging) from both attacks launched over the network.

3) not currently implemented by Core, but possible, the broadcast architecture makes it possible to use non-Internet methods of communication with super-extreme bandwidth asymmetry (high download but little upload).

Dinofelis, you clearly seem to have some academia background. But it must have been some theology school (or something equally anti-scientific) to be so unwilling to actually refer to the available references and verify your own assumptions.

Comparing fiat to crypto is apples to oranges. Replacing one fiat with another is not the same thing as replacing fiat with a non-government currency. I think you are arguing details and failing to see the point. When I wrote that I was referring to private money replacing fiat, not one slavery note being swapped for another.

Your emission scheme is just that - a scheme. Why would you want to peg to something you want to replace? That doesn't make sense. My guess is you're an older fellow who probably just can't wrap your head around life without the USD, and definitely not without fiat at all. How do I know? Because you are blurring the lines between fiat that derives its value from government force, and crypto which is private money that derives its value naturally, in the eyes of the consumer. Fiat and private money are totally different and you can't take circumstances from one and apply them to the other.

It takes years of brainwashing, like majoring in Economics-style-brainwashing, to think deflationary currencies are bad and elastic money supplies are good. Its the foolishness, if not downright insanity, of thinking that there is a magic algo or philosopher kings who can decide what the volume and value of money should be on any given day rather than leaving it to the market.

Right, let's just get this straight. 

The US dollar is not volatile compared to Bitcoin.  Furthermore, the volatility in the day that it has typically varies around the same price range, while Bitcoin can swing by huge percentages in the course of a few days.

People here can imagine a life without USD, but that's just it:  imagining.  It will take time because Bitcoin's volatility is based on people's confidence, which is not as high as it will be yet.

Sure, it's not 100% accurate (the Big Mac Index is pretty close), but it's a damn good way to determine what the value and spending power of your Bitcoin is and what it has been in the few years that it's existed for.

Bitcoin is volatile in terms of US Dollars. My point to dinofelis is: So what? Why is that a problem?

Another question for dinofelis: Why do people/businesses accept US Dollars in the first place?

In this thread: people whining that they're unable to force third parties to compromise Bitcoin.

Actually we were sidetracking into an economic discussion. You might want to read over it, you might learn something.

This reminds me of Panama's currency: the Balboa.  Like Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries they suffered from high inflation.  So, they pegged the Balboa 1:1 with the USD.  After a while, they figured why print Balboas if they are pegged to the USD.  They now use USD and call it Balboa.

Cab: "5 Balboas"
Me: Hand them $5 USD and call it a Balboa.


How does this compare with the elasticity of the USD?  They can print more, but aside from gift cards and similar tokens - which are pegged 1:1 with the USD - you don't have much option.  I've had a difficult time getting anywhere to accept my Quetzales, except in Guatemala  They seem to like them there.
 


Spain never saw the hyperinflation coming after bringing back gold from their "conquests".  Good point.



I use it as money.  I buy clothes, musical stuff, flowers with it.  I also offer a 20% discount if people pay with BTC or LTC because I know PayPal won't take the money out of my account one day because somebody's account was hacked and they would prefer I pay the cost than they do.


Core.  I would suggest that is what Core wants and that's why we have the rise of Bitcoin Unlimited.  If you're interested watch SegWit v Bitcoin Unlimited with Roger Ver and Johnny from Blockstream on YouTube.  

 

It is for that exact reason, after much contemplation, that I finally decided to switch to a BU mining pool and run the full node BU client.  Putting some numbers on a hard drive and wanting to get rich by doing nothing is stupid and is why I am diversifying.  I want to be able to send money to my son on the other side of the world and for him to be able to use it.  I want to see it used for remittances because it is faster and more secure than walking out of a Western Union with pockets full of cash.


Agreed.  RipplePay and PayPal did exactly that - only nodes.  PayPal went the way of tying to bank accounts and RipplePay went nowhere, until copying Bitcoin and creating "Ripple" (still going nowhere, imo).


It depends.  I love that their is a BigMac Index.  

If I buy a bean burrito, in USD, in El Salvador it's priced at 99¢ at Taco Bell.  In the USA, it is priced at $1.49.  It's the same product pegged to the same currency (USD is EV currency as of 2004, so they could get a highway), but in different locations.  

Everything is relative.  When I lived in the Netherlands, the price of the Euro was so high that it made the same item 1.6x the price as the USA because I was paid in USD to a US bank account.  

Big blocks are similar to the tendency americans have to throw random piles of money at problems and hope they go away.

Bitcoin Unlimited: "Let's make blocks bigger and hope all of bitcoin's problems disappear."

That's not a good policy. We can do better.

You want compromise? How is this? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0pCxG5Iok)

Core refusing to provide bigger blocks IS the problem.

Wu was it your name?
From my point of view I see you BU guys and gals acting like you own Bitcoin, you are not even entitled to it or if you are then it is equal to every body in this community, you constantly talking like we're retarded and don't understand anything so we need you to tell us what is good and who is bad.
Godmother more concern than a mother? that's a saying if I got it right though.

With all the love and respect for Satoshi, fack his vision dude, he was just around for one year and either diverted Bitcoin and whole community towards his di*k or one of you guys killed him back then lol.

Core devs are around and active for more than 6 years but for more than 4 years Satoshi's vision was blinded or you were blind? then coming out since 2015, there was no SW back then was it? then what was the excuse to create BU? are we not running on the same chain until now ever since? I'd say they have done a great job so far and now that they are trying to move to the next big level they became the enemy?

Some damn decent enemies they are working in our favor up to $1800.

You think that we can't see that you saw an opportunity and grabbed it in the air after realizing with enough hash power and friendly full nodes at your side you could take over? 

Do you have a proposal?

Not retarded, you just bought into some (apparently very effective) propaganda.


 

So, you understand Satoshi's vision for Bitcoin as peer to peer cash that can scale worldwide, but you'd rather have Blockstream's settlement network?  Have you thought about what the next step would be after the high fees we're seeing?  


Are you that simplistic that all you can see is the current price and not understand the fundamentals underneath it and where they are going?


I'm not a miner.  Just a concerned investor.

Because as it seems miners are not educated enough to review the codes of either proposals and need to be taught which direction to take.
If all the miners were experts they could've figured out which is what and who is blocking the development.
That alone is a very good sign as it proves and demonstrates that Bitcoin is indeed decentralized.
Hey lets increase the block size, lets compromise:

'Sure why not here you go this is the compromise you asked for'.

Oh so with some small storms you just gave up and handed over everything to another party?

With billions of dollars at stakes they are doing the best thing not compromising, if they were so easily to give up on everything then no one would've trusted them thus far.
We as users want the name of the BTC and also demanding what only altcoins can currently provide but we don't want them since their price, market and acceptance is not as wide as Bitcoin.
We want to eat fast food but not getting fat by eating it and that is not how the universe works mates.

For current problems, they need to give a larger number of blocks. However, larger blocks meant security risks, which made the core worry. However, segwit can completely solve the problem. But I do not know why they reject segwit.

All these Segwit compromise and conpiracy theories talk is really exhausting if you dont want to implement segwit then it's fine we haven't really tried all the available options and im sure in the near future new scaling proposals will be presented.
Segwit will activate if there is an emergency in bitcoin, thats all there is to it.

R.I.P BU Troll Jonald Fyookball

I'm not associated with BU nor did I mention it here

  the miners were promised a blocksize increase HF to go along with segwit, in Hong Kong by Blockstream CEO Adam Back, and they never got it. 

"Technically", they said they would do it as long as there was "agreement" amongst other core developers. But yes, the fact that they seem to have reneged on that and given certain individuals over there that have become a detriment to core and IMO bitcoin in general due to their attitude, I can certainly see how miners etc are so pissed off they're not willing to just bend over. But we're reaching the point where they're going to have to make a final decision to suck it up and just do it, or risk the future of bitcoin for everyone.

I will be petitioning miners to signal bigger blocks.

I have an advanced degree in my own profession. I ran the pro-formas. I also did a thorough review and, after much consideration, came to the conclusion that it is a debate of Bitcoin as a commodity vs. currency. I believe Bitcoin is a currency to use.  I am running a proforma and needing to convert BTC to USD to show the government because I am going to work mostly in Bitcoin, Litecoin because of their security and certainty that they are not fake.  I also want to support the system and believe they are a great form of payment!

After considering the facts, I made the most informed decision I could in order to support Bitcoin as a currency.  I believe we need faster confirmations and low transaction fees (micro-payments) in order for this to work. I think this will help more people adopt it and increase its usefulness.  I see larger block sizes as the most logical answer: (a) it addresses an immediate need; (b) provides for additional scale-ability in the future and (c) does not prevent layer II solutions.  

I, also, believe we need to hit the top of "S-curve" market adoption (if it is one) in order for most of the SegWit options to function optimally.  That is how I arrived at my decision to run and support BU.  Now, it's up to each person to arrive at their own conclusion.  That's how I made my decision: BU is the only way to scale blocksize and it's not perfect. I prefer BIP101 because of the predictability, but it's up to each person to make up their own mind.  

Name calling brings down the community.  

1) audit, yes, I do not deny this.  You can find out for yourself whether the bitcoin block chain is doing what you thought it was supposed to be doing (that is to say, whether it corresponds to the protocol programmed in the node software).    Now you can learn whether that is a yes or a no.  But that's about it.  
It is like checking a signature.  You can see whether it is right or not.  But that's about it.  You can't DO anything about this.  You can write an article about it here on the forum, or you can write this on coindesk or something.  "hey, guys, the unique block chain is not checking on my node !".   Duh.  
You may use that knowledge to sell your coins (using *another* node that will allow you to send transactions, and does accept the block chain's protocol!) because you may think that bitcoin is screwed now.  But that's about it.  Yes, it will INFORM you.  No, it won't do anything about it.

2) how's that ?  We know their IP addresses.  Why would an attacker bother to attack Joe's node in his basement, when he knows the node IP of BitFury, say ?  But I will agree with you that a P2P architecture has some network advantages if direct internet connections are problematic.  However, you don't need the BITCOIN P2P network for that.  You can use just ANY P2P network, like Tor, to do the network communication between the customer (the wallet user) and the provider (the miner pool backbone).  You can argue: yes, but what if THEIR backbone fails ?  Well, in as much as the bitcoin P2P network finds a way around, just ANY internet connection will find a way around.

3) actually, that would rather be the direct connection between user wallets (customers) and the miner pools (providers).  Note that these miner pools may just as well have a DISTRIBUTED network of proxies (distributed, but centralized under their control) in the same way that google and facebook have distributed but centralized proxy servers all over the world.  What full nodes do, is to provide miners with a free proxy service.  

The point is that non mining full nodes don't contribute to the DECENTRALIZATION (not to the distributedness) of the network.  Decentralisation is about power and politics ; distributed is about network architecture.  full nodes don't have the slightest bit of political POWER.


This is funny, because I'm the only one never to use something else but logical arguments, and try to reason from a given to a result, without thinking about politics, autority, "others say so", etc... but just sheer reasoning.  I'm totally a scientist.  I'm actually the one thinking I came in some sort of church or something, where established dogma may not be questioned.  One of these is "full nodes are important to the decentralization of the network".

Now, given the fact that this in my honest opinion totally flawed statement is so often used to take decisions, I would think it is important to establish its veracity or its falsehood.  You would think that if Pythagoras' theorem is used all over the place, that *there's a solid logical proof* of it.  But no.  If presented with a proof of the opposite, there's no watertight demonstration of the veracity of the theorem in sight.  Only "you're wrong" or "you're a shill" or "you're religious" or whatever.  No mathematician ever would say, to someone that says "I think Pythagoras' theorem is wrong", "you're religious".  He would just give the demonstration of the theorem.  That should convince.  I think I have enough arguments to show that full nodes don't contribute anything to political decentralized power.  Show me the proof of the opposite.

For that, I discussed elsewhere the following Gedanken experiments, which will abstractly show one or the other: full nodes impose their view on miners, or the other way around.

Starting condition: today.  Miners and nodes agree on the same, current, protocol.  I consider two (abstract) cases to come to the conflicting situation, where miners and full nodes are in disagreement: A: the miners change something ; B: the full nodes change something.

A) suppose that the 20 miner pools (>99% of hash power) decide amongst themselves, to start mining blocks of 1.2 MB.  They publicly announce this, and there's also a version of bitcoin node software that can do this.   No non mining node agrees.  They all stop.  The miners continue making the block chain with 1.2 MB blocks.  What happens ?   Do users connect their wallets to the miner nodes, and continue using bitcoin, or does bitcoin come to a grinding halt, no exchanges, no transactions, nothing, all the time these miners keep making the new chain (and no old protocol chain is available) ?

B) suppose that the 20 miner pools keep on working on the bitcoin chain as today, but ALL non mining full nodes want to impose blocks of 0.5 MB as from tomorrow.  For one or other reason, all full nodes agreed upon that.  So they all implement the new software, that doesn't agree any more with the block chain the miners are making.   Do users connect their wallets to the miner nodes, and continue using bitcoin, or does bitcoin come to a grinding halt, no exchanges, no transactions, nothing, all the time these miners keep making the old chain (and no new protocol chain is available) ?

From these two exercises, what can we conclude about the political power of full nodes over miners concerning bitcoin's protocol ?

BU is a very bad choice. If a group of people truly cared about resolving this issue they would have simply forked core to include segwit and a 2Mb block size. I suspect people would have happily signaled and even forked to that which would have communicated an extreme lack of confidence in core. That's how you "win" at something like this. The way people are going about it now is completely foolish and risky.

I must have been misunderstood.  I didn't say "peg to the USD".  I did say "regulate to an amount of value" (and I took the amount of value that $1 represents today).   A given amount of hash work represents an amount of economic value.  If one can have a decent estimation of how much economic value an amount of hash work will represent in the future (say, Moore's law and somewhat extra), we can program in advance the amount of hash work that can make a coin at a given moment in time.  If we can fix that more or less to what corresponds to $1 today (say, one fifth of a Big Mac), then people will automatically generate coins if they are worth more than the economic cost of hashing them.  There's no "pegging mechanism" to the dollar ; there's a pegging mechanism to economic cost of hashing.  This curve can be even slightly deflationary (that is to say, the expected hash cost will increase over time, the difficulty will outpace technological evolution).  It doesn't matter much.  There's a value regulation mechanism.


The FED tries to regulate the VALUE of the USD to follow a more or less established inflation curve.

If suddenly, someone dumps 500 billion dollars on the market, the FED will sell assets and buy up dollars to avoid a serious crash of the dollar value.  
You cannot crash the dollar market by dumping it.  You cannot corner the dollar market by buying up all dollars: the FED will print you out of business.

Probably, the European central bank is even more an "automatic regulator of value" than the FED is, because the FED also has political goals, while the ECB doesn't, really.


Sure.  I also use bitcoin occasionally.  But I mean, "the general public".   The gains you have by using it don't outweigh the volatility risk.  Apart from special applications, and apart from some geekiness, honestly, doing a wire order to an exchange, buying coins, withdrawing them, paying on the internet, is more hassle and cost than using my credit card for everything which is "open and legal".  And with my credit card, I have some legal protection if I'm scammed.

Putting aside a reserve of bitcoin for future buying (which I did, because of said hassle) and see that it takes a factor of 5 gains, induces me to keep them aside even if that wasn't the purpose.   But it could just as well go down.  So this "money" cannot be stored as neutral value keeper.  If you store it, you speculate (heavily).  Most people speculate on "up", of course, but they speculate.  They end up speculating even if that was not the idea.

But is it malicious segwit or not?
Is it a Trojan horse segwit or not?

Will other(old) nodes be able to function if not upgraded to segwit or not?

Are you joking about a currency with growing blockchain size to Terabytes then how could normal users run a full node after say 4 years from now?

I already suggested a method but I don't know if that is actually possible or can be achieved;

Instead of thousands of full nodes can we have 1000 nodes containing and storing/validating first %10 of blockchain data then another 1000 nodes going with the next %10 of the data and so on to the end, could we treat 100 computers as a single super computer if we were to write the protocol for it?
How come we are accepting the current protocols as the only central authority of network I'm sure we'll do the same with that kind of protocols.

See how important this point is !

Note that most users don't use full nodes.  There are more than 5000 or so bitcoin users in the world.


Look at the edit at the end of my previous post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1915733.msg19025925#msg19025925

in order to see what's the genuine utility of full nodes.

Do you really believe the current VISA network could be run with the technology of 1949, namely: tabulating machines, punched cards and telegraph lines? This is when the Diner's Club was first conceived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International)

Back in 2013 I built a computer with an 18 TB raw 12 TB usable RAID 6 array in order to store the Bitcoin blockchain. I purchased the RAID controller from Roger Ver's Bitcoin store. My RAID array is mostly empty, but I suspect it will become useful in the future to store a certain alt-coin's blockchain. I will leave it to the reader to guess which one. Hint: It has an adaptive blocksize.

My current own understanding of bitcoin is the following: it has *economic* incentives that centralize it, into a separate industry of "block chain providers" (miner pools / miner hardware owners) and its customers (bitcoin users that want to transact).

The customers need the block chain providers to be able to use bitcoin (that is, to transact) ; while the chain providers sell the chain to the users who pay for it by buying the coins that these chain providers can obtain or invent (fees and block rewards).

This is not very different from a central bank + commercial banks providing payment services to their customers, but there ARE notable differences, nevertheless: there's no organized decision hierarchy amongst the industrials, and as such, these competing entities are for the moment locked in into an immutability of the protocol they use to make the block chain.  None of them, individually, can deviate from it ; and there's no global decider for them (for the moment).  There's no "board of governors" of the industry of block chain providers.

As a whole, this system works quite reliably.  The customers send their transactions to the industrials, who have some incentive to include it in the block chain they provide to the customers and it is almost impossible for any one to deviate from the established rules of functioning, without risking to lose a lot of money.  The customers use the transactions to obtain value, to speculate amongst themselves and so on, and this establishes a market price of the tokens they transact ; this market value is what the industrials can obtain from their customers by selling them back the coins they obtained from them or they were allowed to invent from thin air.

This split between industrials and customers is a basic design "feature" of bitcoin, which I consider a big mistake.  The other feature, which I also consider a big mistake in bitcoin is its emission curve which turns it into a speculative asset, and doesn't allow it to become a genuine currency.  But who am I to consider these features "mistakes" ?  They are only mistakes if we wanted to make a decentralized currency.  They are not a mistake if we wanted to make a highly speculative asset: in fact, the design for that is near perfect.

However, the distinction between "currency" and "speculative asset" plays a huge role if one were to change bitcoin's protocol.  If one doesn't change it, whatever the "original idea" was, doesn't matter, it will do whatever it will do (it IS a highly speculative asset and nothing indicates it won't stay that).  If we want to modify it, however, we would need to know where we are heading.

I think that if we want to turn it into a genuine currency, there's no point in twiddling the technical aspects of it, as long as the two basic aspects, industrials vs customers and emission curve, aren't modified to turn it into something that might look more like a decentralized currency: no more "industrials selling block chain", but users making their own block chain (say, something like PoS) ; and a flexible coin emission that stabilizes the coin's value.  But this is entirely against the religion of bitcoin.  So this is not possible. 

As long as that is not possible, bitcoin cannot turn into a genuine currency and will remain a speculative asset.

I haven't fully studied all aspects of segwit, but it contains a lot of very smart improvements in the technical details of transaction processing.  Purely on the technical side, segwit is a good improvement. 

However, segwit got entangled with something totally different, which is the LN.  The LN can be a smart idea too.  It is however, a totally different concept of transaction, with a totally different trust model. What has screwed up the whole story, is the fact that segwit proponents are LN proponents who seem to want to FORCE bitcoin usage onto the LN, and for that, OFF the main chain.  But that is fundamentally problematic in my eyes.  The fact that one uses a totally bogus argument, namely the "importance of the non mining full node in Joe's basement", while one ignores entirely the actual semi-centralized true power structure of bitcoin, which is industrials making block chain versus customers using the block chain and paying the miner's tokens, and *keeps a tight limit on on-chain transactions* on the basis of this bogus argument, sounds strange.

Because in order for the LN to be trustless, one needs to be able to settle easily.  If not, if ever the on chain settlements are *not in principle capable of settling the entire LN quickly at any moment*, the LN is like "fractional reserve banking" but not in coins, but in transactions.  In principle each one of us can settle, but we can't, all of us.  In a fractional reserve bank, each one of us can withdraw his money, but not all of us.

In other words, the LN is only trustless, if at any moment, it can settle FULLY on chain.  Like full banking: at any moment, EVERYBODY can withdraw their money.

I would be entirely favorable for the LN, if the possibility to settle, for everyone, at any moment, were possible.

Who would compare VISA with bitcoin ??? can you ask every individual around the world using a VISA card to run the entire network in their computers?
Albeit with 1MB blocks we're going beyond the average user's capability of running full node, while full nodes are no use whatsoever, only miners decide everything, you disagree then try running 1M full nodes and broadcast a transaction then you'll be waiting until the end of days for your coins to validate and become spendable.
There is no need for 2/4/6/8 >MB blocks as 500KB would be enough for next 6 month, IMAO bitcoin should increase blocksize by 500KB every 6 months.
What do you people really expect from Core team?
Governments around the globe are breaking under the pressure of managing a currency, yet Core has managed to maintain a fu**ing economy not by controlling it but by proposing the ideas and letting the decentralized network to reach a consensus.
Is little Wu ready to lead a international nation/country without enforcing his desirable rules upon the whole system?

How did you come up with that number?

Well how about this alternative: one corporation controls the trajectory of bitcoin protocol and network, and we're supposed to magically trust them with this responsibility, despite their sketchy and counter-productive behavior? *cough* Blockstream *cough*

Even if only one person "controlled" bitcoin, who is to say that they would want to run it into the ground?

Indeed, the true centralization of crypto in general is linked to who can decide about the protocol.  MOST crypto is heavily centralized in this respect, because most crypto has a lead developer that decides about future evolution of the protocol.  We saw this clearly with ethereum where the unthinkable in crypto happened: modifying the past, not by modifying the block chain data, but by modifying the protocol that tells you how to interpret that block chain data.  Many other coins have such single dev team: DASH with Evans, LTC with Lee, of course ETH with Vitalik, ...
If you can change the code, you can change all of it, no matter all the "crypto".

In fact, bitcoin is decentralizing by not letting Core just do what it wants on this side ; but it is centralizing in the mining industry.

The point, of course, is that if there's a limited power structure in crypto (that is, if the deciders can sit in one room and come to an agreement, like they did on litecoin), it is a kind of "governors of the central bank".  Governors of the central bank also don't want to run the fiat they command, into the ground.

It's a problem because US dollars, in this case, are representing what items you would be able to buy with Bitcoin as they're a relatively stable thing to compare it against.  Bitcoin's volatility against USD means that it won't be practical for regular transactions until the amount of money that people hold in it has stabilised.

I sent a transaction 5 days ago with the proper fee...

It still has 0 confirmations.  :-\

Bitcoin is practically useless at this point until one of these scaling proposals are activated.

Indeed, it is somewhat delusionally to think that if some asset in a liquid market has high volatility as expressed in a major fiat, such as the US dollar, it is the dollar that is fluctuating and not the asset.  In the relatively short term, big fiat are very stable units of account (unless something quite spectacular happens) in the sense that a quantity of this fiat represents a constant market value of commodities, whether it is bread, computers, cars, bananas, coffee, theatre tickets, or... other stable currencies.

Of course, and that was I think the essence of cryptoanarchists' remark, this is somewhat self-referential.  But in the end, it doesn't matter.  If you can buy about the same amount of Big Macs, bread, tooth brush, cars, bananas etc... with, directly, or after exchanging it for another currency, it HAS a stable value.  Because in the end, value, that is an amount of Big Macs, bread, tooth brush, cars and bananas.

In the very long run, fiat currencies are less good units of account ; but then, not much is, because the notion itself of "same value" in remote and totally different economies is ill defined.  How do you compare the value of, say, a dagger in the 7th century with something today ?

But a thing even used as a major currency, that doesn't have a price-stabilizing mechanism, will NEVER stabilize, simply because of the variable economic activity, and the variable velocity of money in Fisher's formula:

Q.P = M . V

From which: P = M . V / Q, the price level depends on V and on Q.   V depends heavily on the hoarding habits of people, and Q depends on the economic activity.  If M is a hard number, it will never be stable.  Especially if a large part of M is being hoarded, and V is very sensitive to the small amount of non-hoarded coins.

If there's a feedback mechanism from P to M, which is what central banks do, then this can stabilize P.  If no such mechanism is known, P will be very dependent on V and Q.

This is true.  One thing I did not realize when I bought my first S9 was that "difficulty" continues to increase.  That simply means, which I did not know when I started, that as more hash power comes online it reduces the percentage I contribute.  In January I received 0.018 BTC per day.  Now, I receive 0.013 BTC per day.  Correction, 0.011 the last 24 hours. My hash percentage has almost been halved and the price of Bitcoin has nearly doubled.  If the price were to fall to $700, I would turn off the miners.  


I do that in my pro-forma. I'm sure the larger and sophisticated companies do the same.  Who would regulate it?  If it's in the code, well, I'm sure there is a coin that does that: http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins


When visiting Argentina, México, Guatemala and Morocco - to the best of my recollection - they accepted USD.  Is the value of the Méxican peso low because they accept USD?  What happens when a lot of USD goes out of the country through black market or people taking $9,999 outside the US?  If people bring it back in ... let's say all of the evil corporations bring their money to the US from offshore accounts, how does that impact the value of the USD both in the US and globally?  


Cool.  I was starting to wonder  ???


They do for me because of my globetrotting nature, but that's why I am in BTC.

I agree that those who hold speculate.  There is no doubt about that.  Mainstream adoption, for remittances and such, would likely be an "in-and-out" transaction w/ a company holding that risk.  Ethereum may be the best place for this, but I think that whole damn thing is funky because of the pre-mine and DAO.  If you want to talk about scam and trouble with the SEC, the Ethereum founders use tricky language to avoid regulations and are located in Switzerland - thinking it will help them avoid regulations.


Yup. Good thing you don't live in Greece or Spain.  However, there is something private and personal about our spending habits that have been exploited.  Even when the banks - they speculate and *shouldn't* - have required a bailout.  

I have bank accounts as well.


I was glad to see the price drop a little and I'm hoping it does not go over $2000 before the end of June-ish.  


I agree. I am holding it because of the high tx count and not wanting to pay high fees.  I'm also saving to buy another miner.  It's just another currency for me, a foreign currency for the country of the Internet.

I'm sure you have seen this:
https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

V = value
Q = quantity
P = price
M = ???

I love theory. It's so cool. Seriously. 

You're going a little off the rails, blindly accepting economic formulas. Here's an interesting article about bitcoin volatility that proves you wrong:  http://woobull.com/bitcoin-volatility-will-match-major-fiat-currencies-by-2019/ (http://woobull.com/bitcoin-volatility-will-match-major-fiat-currencies-by-2019/)

Since you didn't really answer:

Q. Why do people/businesses accept US Dollars in the first place?

A. Because of legal tender laws that force you to accept them. Does Fisher's formula take that into account?

Forced acceptance of a rigged scheme is why Bitcoin was invented.

network effect

After they removed gold backing domestically from USD in the 30s, and made holding gold illegal, there were several legal tender court cases over people who refused to accept FRNs for payment of debts. The courts, clearly in violation of the Constitution they swore an oath to, ruled against them.

Can you see parallels to what's happening now?

Ditto, took 2 days for mine. Getting beyond stupid.

They will have to comprise at some point. If they kepe having backlogs of transactions people won't do stuff with bitcoin, then price will go down. It will regulate itself out in the end!

Will they? Seems like TPTB can buy as much hashpower as they need to drag this out forever (BitFury, BTCC, Slush).

Does that mean that we wont have a solution for the issues we are facing.Some has to hire a professional to negotiate with these people and come up with a amicable solution like they did with litecoin and they had Charlie Lee to lead the talks and we really need satoshi to come back and voice his opinion regarding these and reach a solution,if not they will be killing the economic invention of the century.

M is monetary mass: the amount of coins in circulation.

Fisher's formula is essentially tautological.  It goes like this:
Q = the amount of economic goods that were bought with the currency, in a unit of value (say, a Big Mac, but it doesn't matter) in a given period
P = the price in units of our currency, of that unit of value (presumed stable enough during the period)

Clearly, Q . P = the amount of our currency that went over the counter to buy Q

M is the total amount of coins of our currency in existence (presumed fixed during the period)
We split that amount in different "kinds": m0 ; m1 ; m2 ; m3 .... mn so that their sum is M.

m0 are the coins that didn't move during this period (were held)

m1 are the coins that were spend once during this period

m2 are the coins that were spend twice: from A to B, and from B to C.

m3 are the coins that were spend three times

...

mn are the coins that were spend n times.

Clearly, the total amount of spendings, is:

m1 + 2 m2 + 3 m3 + ... + n mn

The total amount of spendings must be equal to the total amount of coins that went over the counter:

P . Q = m1 + 2 m2 + 3 m3 + .... + n mn

Now, define V = m1/M + 2 m2/M + 3 m3/M + ... n mn/M
which is the weighted average number of times a coin was spend during this period.

Then we have: P . Q = M . V


You shouldn't consider my critique of bitcoin as a critique of the idea to have a free currency.   My critique of bitcoin considers the bad design of it, not its pretended reason of existence.

I bet the Chinese and Japanese exchanges, speculators and mining farms want to increase the block size and avoid off chain solutions. Why have the Asians not taken over development? They currently control most of the bitcoin market why shouldn't they control development?  Why is the Western world controlling what has clearly become an Asian commodity?

This is an interesting article, but I would like to see the volatility definition he's using.  Of course bitcoin cannot be that small circle.  Maybe he's only taking, say, 24 hr volatility or something, and not the entire RMS of the whole curve, in other words, only the high-frequency spectrum of the price curve ?

Clearly, bitcoin's dollar price doesn't look like a FLAT LINE with some noise on it at all, which is what low long-term volatility would mean.  

The point is that it is economically well-known that collectibles have no stable price, which was the problem with the booms and busts of gold-based currencies (which was essentially "solved" by fractional reserve banking, putting again elasticity in the monetary offer).

"Centralized authority, please save us !"

The economic invention of the century would regulate itself, and wouldn't need an intervention from the board of gouvernors, don't you think ?

The way that you're measuring volatility is extremely one-dimensional. 

As you can clearly see if you look at the actual charts instead of arbitrary measurements of day by day volatility, you'll realise that the US dollar's fluctuation is held fairly consistently around the same range.

Bitcoin's fluctuation is based on trends because the price is only about how much people are willing to pay in order to hold the coin. 

Sure, you can say that Bitcoin is becoming less volatile, but in the last few weeks it's rose from about $1200 to about $1800.  The US dollar's changes have been barely noticeable.  It's just not a comparable type of volatility.

Indeed, I didn't look into the numbers, but I have the impression that analysis only considered the high-frequency part of the volatility (say, daily or hourly or so).  As you correctly point out, the low frequency volatility (weeks, months, years) of most big fiat is pretty small, and that of bitcoin is still huge.
For instance, over its 17 years of existance, the EURO and the USD never deviated more than something like 50%, going from an exchange rate of 0.8 to 1.5 or so.

Over its 8 years of existence, bitcoin did 6 orders of magnitude.  Of course, that won't happen any more (1 billion a coin :) I'm hodling in case :) ).  But in 2 years time, same vol, don't think so.  It doesn't contain any regulating mechanism !

When you are so desperate, you start writing medium articles even though you're a nobody in the Bitcoin world. An Open Letter to Bitcoin Miners - Jonald Fyookball (https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/an-open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-c260467e1f0) ::)

Clearly not.

---

It started with Ver's tweet, and now they're pushing this false rhetoric. The end goal of BU & the proponents is heavy centralization of the system. No wonder cypherpunk don't want to "compromise" with the loons. ::)

What is "unusable" to you, is usable to others.

If you used the "proper" fee your tx would have confirmed by now.

Not to mention there is a thing called Replace By Fee which you could have used (did you?) where you can submit another tx with a different fee amount after the fact to make sure it gets confirmed assuming you've been waiting for a while, which you have been.

...says a Core talking points copy-paster minion...

I thought the article was good, thanks for hyping it,

When you are so desperate, you start attacking the author instead of refuting the arguments.

Keep up the good work, Jonald. And kudos for keeping your cool under fire and staying diplomatic.

I see a shift happening amongst free-thinking people.

Neither am I copy-past, nor am I any kind of minion. Maybe you should look at the people who you praise; they got some nice Reddit badges (among other things) for their *work*.

Are you telling me Jihad & co should be the only ones running nodes? ::)

There isn't a single technical argument in that thread. There is only "[y] is [z] because I think it is [z] or [insertAppealToAuthority]".

This article is an opinion piece.  There is nothing in it that constitutes proof.  So you should refrain from using the term "proves you wrong" as it does not.  The basis of the article is to take some past behavior and project it into the future.   This is what is known as extrapolation.  Proof by extrapolation is not really a thing.  Also, in finance extrapolation is known to be a poor tool for anticipating the future.  For example, look at XRP, it's grown 50x in 2 months.  Let's extrapolate that to the end of the year.  Oh wait, now XRP is worth 50^3 = 125000x its current value or >100tt usd market cap. Now I've proved that XRP will be worth as much as all the worlds equities by the end of the year.  It must be true, because I proved it (would it help if I provide nice charts to show this proof on? I can, so please don't doubt its veracity.)  The proof that you offered about BTC 2019 volatility is worth just as much as the one I've offered about XRP end of year market cap.

The irony here (situational) is that while you accused one person of blindly accepting formulas (he didn't, *), you have blindly accepted the analysis of a blogger and stated it to be fact.  Are you able to see the irony in this?

(*) It's helpful to understand that V is simply defined to be the variable which makes the formula true.  So by definition the formula is always true.  It's sort of like blindly accepting 1=1.  If you can accept that, then you should be comfortable with Fischer's formula.

Well, yes... but only by kicking someone else out of the line. Whose fee was 'proper' until you upped the ante.

Of course, I'm not a twit, so perhaps I am merely ignorant here. Is there some Tweet made on the part of Roger Ver which you are claiming has started the instances of people pointing out that non-mining entities have no actual power on the Bitcoin network? Because that is what it looks like you are claiming. Would you be a good sport and post a link to this alleged tweet that started it all? Thanks.

This is something I've been claiming for quite a while, I'm not aware of any tweets or anything, I just came, totally by myself, to that (rather obvious) conclusion by studying the system.  I've tried to explain that several times here, the reasoning is not so difficult to follow, and doesn't need any authority because it is a logical deduction from the known technical aspects of bitcoin - but if anything, it was the exact reason of why PoW was introduced in the first place.

That said, the fact that Satoshi introduced PoW to *deny full nodes any consensus decision power* is, in itself, not a logical proof: it would be a fallacy as I've been lining out several others of committing the error of taking a desirable goal as a logical consequence.  So it is not because Satoshi *wanted* full nodes not to have any consensus decision power, that this is the case.  It is simply the case because if you do the *Gedanken experiment* where all non-mining full nodes try to enforce a protocol change, and all the miners keep on their protocol, it are the miners that win, and the full nodes that stop.  I consider that as the logical proof that purely technically, full nodes don't decide anything, nor about the building of the block chain, nor about the protocol it has to obey.
At best, full nodes can *signal* a kind of desire by users - but they are not representative of users.  Less than 1% of users runs a full node, and maybe many of them aren't even strongly attached to the "signal" of their node, they just want running software.  >99% of users don't have full nodes ; nobody knows what is the economical weight of the full node owners who are strongly politically committed to one or another choice, so nobody can have an idea what block chain would get most of the market cap after an eventual hard fork (which is what full nodes, at best, could signal, if they were economically representative, which they aren't).

Miners make the block chain(s) ; users vote on it with their money on exchanges.  Miners sell block chain to users, who pay for it by buying the coins miners obtain that way.  Users "buy block chain" because they have reasons to want to use it (for transactions, for speculation, ....) That's the economic model of a PoW crypto currency.  Full nodes are proxy servers putting themselves in between the miners and the users, which have as limited use, the fact that users don't have to have a direct internet connection to miners, but can use also a P2P network to obtain their certified transactions on the chain, and to send their transactions to the miners who will hopefully include them in the chain they collectively produce.  If direct internet connections are possible, the use of full node proxy servers is questionable.  If direct internet connections are problematic, the full node proxy servers have a useful communication role.

Full nodes can be useful for their owners: checking what happens (without power to act) ; deniability of sending one's own transactions.  Fun.

I have not seen this argument being used by almost any BU supporter until Ver made the following Tweet:
https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/853250894162350080

Indeed. You may recall my first direct response to you was to thank you for stating the view that non-mining entities have no real power in the Bitcoin network - for the exact reasoning you state. I went on to explain that I had been tilting at that proverbial windmill for some months -- as a lone and ridiculed voice in the crowd. I had come to this conclusion pretty much as you state, after a loooong period of 'drinking the proverbial non-mining-but-validating-entities-guard-the-system koolaid'. Of course, you articulate the reasoning in a much clearer manner, which has helped to crystalize my thinking on the matter.

But really, I was hoping Lauda would step up to the challenge of providing attribution for his/her claim that "it all started with Ver's tweet". For I believe this to be unmitigated bullshit. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. It looks like just another weak-minded aspersion-casting on the part of a party bereft of a logical argument.

Oh look - there it is. Thanks for stepping up.

Nevertheless, April 15 of this year is long after this position had been publicly advocated. Maybe you just missed it?

---

edit: went spelunking - below are a few instances of such a claim that predate Ver's tweet VVVV

Conclusion on Mar 20: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg18271681#msg18271681

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833166.msg18258671#msg18258671

stronger wording: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg18257263#msg18257263

This one is precious - it is in direct response to you. Mar 12: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1820846.msg18162340#msg18162340

Hey! Here's my post to dinofelis that I alluded to above: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1820846.msg18155798#msg18155798

"non-mining nodes don't count for doodley-squat": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1752746.msg17602571#msg17602571

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1752746.msg17560211#msg17560211

Middle of 2016... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg15751668#msg15751668

11+ months ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1330553.msg14994560#msg14994560

"nodes have fuck-all to say about it" - more than a year ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1393827.msg14308946#msg14308946

"independent nodes essentially fulfill zero marginal utility": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344522.msg13895379#msg13895379

This one is fun - gmax using his time-tested technique of abandoning a convo that is not going his way. Feb 2016: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1352002.msg13788734#msg13788734

Well, that's all I've the patience for. Demonstrably, this point has been advocated long before Ver's tweet.

Well I see only one way for Bitcoin to get off the dime and somehow the devs of many flavors work out a solution to scaling

That is if Litecoin starts to zoom out stuff on lighting and other stuff now that they have segregated witness up

If that lever does not work to move these guys...I"ve no frigging clue

(yeah its a lame hope..it is all I got at the moment)

I am so confused as to why the scaling problem isn't sorted. This might put off a lot of non techno lay people entering the Bitcoin space because they are used to dealing with cash, fast in and fast out. Bitcoin has huge value but all the DEVS and Miners need to get out of their own little spaces and really think about the common good for everyone to be able to easily adopt and use Bitcoin for everyday use.

To use an analogy, some people want to stay at 1MB blocks due to bandwidth and hard-drive.  If it takes a long time to download the blockchain, then there will be fewer nodes (the story goes).  However, I remember when I paid $350 for a 1.2MP camera.  It even came with a 512MB memory stick.  I, also, had a cell phone and would dial in to Napster at night (theoretically of course) so I could get 8 songs by morning. Now ... I can stream HD, my camera has a higher resolution camera and I carry around 64GB attached to my key-chain.  Locking in at 1MB does not make sense, just as keeping cameras at 1.2MP did not make sense.

It's the process of mining that keeps the network safe.  It consumes energy and the miners are rewarded for protecting the network with 12.5BTC per 10 minutes.  This is divided and among all those who provided hash power towards solving the equation, unless solo mining.

This is one of the funny things in bitcoin: decentralization.  No boss, no hierarchy, no pilot in the plane.  Bitcoin was designed to guarantee (up to a level) that nobody could easily "cheat" ; that is, that nobody in the system could decide, upon his own, to change things, and *not respect the rules*.  Of course, in the beginning, this was not really true: when Satoshi was still the boss, he changed the rules several times.  However, these were "technical" rules.  His self-appointed heirs, the Core dev team, was in fact the only team taking over the development of the code implementing Satoshi's system when he disappeared.  So they have been the "boss" quite a while, and they too, did change quite a lot of technical details.  But none of these affected people (most of them weren't used in fact).  So people let them play and change rules for a while.

There was a ticking bomb that Satoshi himself had put into the bitcoin rules, and which people, back then, warned him about: the block size limit.  Satoshi publicly considered that this limit could easily be removed or changed if ever it was considered reasonable, but people pointed out to him that this was risky: after all, small blocks will make for high fees, and miners will like high fees.  As they are the ones that actually implement the protocol, they might, in fact, seriously hesitate to change it.

At a certain point, Core proposed some quite radical changes to bitcoin.  It goes under the name of Segwit.  It are a lot of technical improvements, a quite radical change of how the block chain is built, and in fact, also a preparation of a totally new way of transacting: the "Lightning Network".   The Lightning Network is an idea that could in principle allow one to use bitcoin transactions without writing them on the chain - only when you are scammed or your partners disappear, you could always "come back" to settle on the chain.  As such, Core considered that increasing the block chain was not going to motivate people on the LN, so they thought that it was a good idea to keep bitcoin's block chain small, and somehow force people off chain.  And they went on telling everywhere how supposedly dangerous it was to go beyond 1 MB blocks.

In the mean time, people were looking also to just do what Satoshi suggested, namely increasing the block size, so that more transactions could go on, but Core resisted, most probably thinking that if they gave in to increase the block size, the utility of their Lightning Network would remain theoretical, and people would always ask for more and more space on the block chain.  By doing so, some "resistance" appeared, that didn't consider Core's central control over bitcoin's rules as "natural".  

This is how Core lost its position as central decider on bitcoin's protocol, so now there is not really a central authority any more.

Once this central authority is gone from bitcoin, it being a decentralized system without "boss" that decides, and its design being such that if you deviate from the rules, you are essentially rejected by the system, nobody can actually really change anything any more, without risking to be rejected and losing a lot of value.  Bitcoin's system is entirely focussed on "no deviation from majority possible", and the majority is de facto the old rule system.  The first one that tries something else, and is not immediately certain of being followed by 70% of the others, will most probably lose all efforts in doing so: bitcoin was made that way.  If there was a central boss that decided for everybody, that would be quite easy.  But right now, with no very clear majority for ONE specific solution, it seems to be locked in to its current protocol.  And IF there is a central boss, then it isn't decentralized any more, which is its main selling point.

As such, it is difficult to see how bitcoin can still change what so ever to its rules.

Nice summary.

FTFY..

Segwit is the compromose and best way foreward. Ask why Bitmain  and his paid off cronies want to strangle bitcoin use and development.

#UASF

That's a flawed conclusion. If both are not to your liking then both must be rejected. As i have. Thus both must start again, unless new developers want to make a better proposal. Anyone here, you and me, can do that. But does anyone ever care to listen to any proposals outside the developers inner circle?

It's called compromise and the lesser of two evils. The hard reality is that when it comes to this sort of thing, there are no black and white perfect solutions. It's all just compromises and levels of risk. So you can choose to not make a choice and wait for some other solution. But it won't be perfect and would require compromises anyway.

Just a few things to add here - the Core dev team went through a series of coups and power plays, and many good devs (including Satoshi's closest confidant, Gavin) were forced off the team, with dirty tricks from a nasty new breed of devs. Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik were also important losses from the team. Many of the remaining dev team members are employees of a privately held corporation, Blockstream, which has demonstrated their intent to make bitcoin a settlement-layer solution for their patented Lightning network.

Contrary to what some may think here, I have nothing against Core.   After all, in a trustless, distributed system, everybody can do what he wants, and Core has the right, just as well as anyone else, to try to set the system to their hand or religion - that's the whole idea, that nobody is to be trusted, and anybody is allowed to do just anything, the system will cope or will fail.

What I wanted to argue was that bitcoin WAS a centralized system with a centralized authority, Core, which did make it possible in the past to apply (modest) changes.  However, what Core simply did, was overplay their hand, and as such, they lost their centralized moral power over the system.  And now, the system got decentralized and hence became immutable.  This is not eternal.  It can sufficiently centralize again to find again a central authority, that will dictate change.  But for the moment, Core lost that position of central trusted authority.    A truly decentralized system is immutable.   So if it changes its protocol, it is of course centralized with a central, trusted authority.  Litecoin is.  Most alt coins are, and bitcoin was centralized until Core overplayed its hand, and the mining pools are not centralized enough as of today, to be able to have a quick decision under the leadership of one single boss (or if they are, that boss has decided to stick with the old bitcoin protocol - both are of course indistinguishable).

Visibly those subtleties are so subtle, that they can never be rationally argued, and can never contradict a logical gedanken experiment of the opposite.  Subtle is the Lord, probably, but is the Lord actually ?

Compromise on security of the network, future mining fees to secure the network, technical debt by adopting segwit in its current form - no thanks. Compromising when $30bn dollars invested in Bitcoin is plain idiotic. One either gets it right or not. If a mistake is made can it be reversed? If no then no compromise can be made.

Nothing more than opinions one way or the other.

You don't want bitcoin then since that was the plan from day 1. Or maybe you haven't read all the emails/posts etc from back then. Why would any miner support the network once the reward gets close to zero without fees to make up for that?

I don't know what world you live in, but everything we develop/code and every little change that's made is a risk and the outcome one "thinks" will happen is made up of a bunch of assumptions and as much testing and scientific proof one can do. Despite that, there is never any guarantee.

You misunderstood me. That's precisely what LN will do - take fees away from the miners thus reducing security in the future.


The real world. ;D ;D

Segwit is not a "little change."
Raising the blocksize to 2mb now, then 4mb by the end of the year is what i call "little change" that can be observed, debated on and possibly reversed if it becomes a disaster. However it will be successfully sufficient to take the risk vs. the outcome of possible increase in spam. In the meantime, Capacity goes up, possible small increase in scaling. Higher scaling can be researched into until a "bright spark" comes up with a better idea.

Well when the price drops and less people use it because it is expensive they will need to compromise. They will eventually. Miners will eventually. Other coins are taking off and people will start to switch.

I am going to sell some digital goods here and if i make someone pay me in btc its gonna cost them an extra dollar fee for no reason.

Everyone keeps using the word "compromise", but no one is actually budging on their stance.  Most of the people fixated on increasing the blocksize still want an increase of at least 200% and most of the people fixated on not touching the 'base' blocksize still want 0% increase until an unspecified time in the future.  

It seems obvious when you say it, but apparently it has to be spelled out in no uncertain terms:  An actual compromise would require both camps to soften their stance a little.  Is anyone prepared to do that?  Stop drawing lines in the sand over what you won't accept and start talking about what you will accept.  And for what must be the dozenth time, the blocksize doesn't have to be a whole number and nor does it have to be static (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1911288.0).  

There can be no compromise in this debate since it is about the hardfork
mechanism itself, not scaling. The scaling debate is only the tool currently
being used to push for a hardfork. In theory, if scaling was the only issue,
there are many different answers that already exist without using a hardfork.

Big Blockers want to use a hardfork, Small Blockers want to use optimizations/
second layers/softforks. So, what is the compromise between those two sides?

There is no compromise for that, only capitulation to one or the other.
By offering a combination of both, it defeats the main cause of the other
position. It ignores the true meaning behind this impasse. That is why this
debate will continue till capitulation or contentious hardfork.

People who are requesting compromises, IMO, are not aware of what is
actually occurring or how Bitcoin functions. Compromise does not exists within
this current Bitcoin debate.

IMO, asking for "compromises" is the most dumbed-down answer that could
ever be provided by anyone. It is the easy answer, no thought involved.
Instead those people need to figure out what the middle ground between a
hardfork and a softfork is, and then you will find your "compromise". Until
then, they should stop requesting nonsense. IMO the future is capitulation
or contentious hardfork. There is no other worthy possibility.

That's not going to happen anytime soon, they have no intention of doing something like that as long as they have a huge gain from the situation as it is now and I think we're all aware of that.

Anyone who believes that is clearly in denial.  Sooner or later there will be a necessary change that can't be achieved via soft fork.  Hardforks can't be avoided forever, so everyone needs to stop soiling themselves at the mere thought of one.  Also, hardforks don't preclude optimisations and second layers, so you can cease that decidedly underhanded insinuation right there.  Are you seriously saying you would have opposed SegWit if it had been proposed as a hardfork?

In the event of a contentious hard fork, I suspect the narrative and rhetoric on these boards would automatically be that the miners forking away were the cause of the split, but history will judge that it takes two parties to have an argument.  Those too belligerent to be reasoned with, who had already closed their mind to anything that wasn't a softfork, would be deemed equally culpable. 

It has nothing to do with belief, it has to do with what is occurring now.
The basis for the current issue is not scaling, it is related to the hardfork
mechanism itself. You ignored what I stated, which is that there is no
compromise between two opposing forces. One must give way to the other,
like all things in life. You disagree with that.

What is delusional is thinking that there can be a middle ground between a
hard or soft fork. In almost all cases, it will need to fall under one or the other.
If not, where is this answer? Where is the middle fork? Currently, it does not
exist and thus why this debate still exists and goes in circles.

The debate is not about "no more hardforks forever", nor did I ever say such,
the issue is whether our technological level has reached the point where we can
do it now without sacrificing current security. Obviously, 10 years from now, a 2-4
MB blocksize hardfork is extremely doable and should preserve the current security
(the only issue then is possible intentional chain split as a malicious attack). The
debate is whether we should do a hardfork now, when technological advancement
has slowed or some think, stopped.

If SegWit was a hardfork, I would equally oppose it today as I do any simple
2MB hardfork. Core Devs developed SegWit in a softfork-able way for this very
purpose, to preserve the verifying nodes who do not wish to upgrade. If they had to
do it in a hardfork way, I am not sure they would have proposed it. When it was
provided as a softfork, they thought the community and miners would be thrilled.
Instead, with some major miners and some in the community, it is seen as bad since
it is not by the hardfork mechanism alone.

This shows that the issue is not scaling, but something else entirely. But interestingly,
according to recent development work, it is alleged that softforks can now be designed
to perform everything that hardforks can do, without the node loss. So we may have
learned that the hardfork/softfork mechanism is a result of our current lack of
understanding of Bitcoin and that only softforks are actually necessary throughout it's
lifespan. Hardforks in that scenario, are only used for serious emergencies where we
must accept security loss to prevent massive immediate failure.

My only point in my comment was that "compromises" may be a misunderstanding
of Bitcoin and how it was intended to function. Satoshi did not compromise and
didn't intended to create a system that needs to have compromises. There will
always be a losing party in this type of system due to the blockchain system itself.
Finding a middle path, between the hard and soft fork, if possible, would have
already occurred. What is occurring now is a slow negotiation that the community
needs to go through till they inevitably learn that it is futile and they have been
confused.

When this is all said and done, someone will give in or perform a contentious
hardfork. The term "compromise", is like Santa Claus, its what we tell the children
to keep them busy. Something will occur eventually, but a "compromise" is unlikely.

AgentofCoin, Thanks. I agree with basically every point made in your last two posts.


Precisely, in fact getting many people to agree to a capacity increase at all given the current environment was very difficult.  The primary selling points was that segwit was risk reduced in many ways (e.g. lowering sighashing cost), that we had other scaling tools planned (BIP152 for example), ... and that it was worth taking some risks to satisify the demands and end the drama.  Oops.

From my perspective: the community already already compromised on the part that we thought we could compromise on.  Beyond that and it's akin to demanding 'compromise' in the form of sawing a disputed infant in half.

I think it's fine and healthy that it takes a while to sort these things out.  Internet scale protocol development doesn't happen fast-- 4Byte ASNs in BGP took about a decade, and BGP is a easier to evolve than Bitcoin in many ways.

In any case, in my view, the slogan should be:

Bitcoin will not be compromised.

If everyone just followed the principles of the original whitepaper as a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", instead of trying to change it into something else then there would be no "losing party." The only losers would be those trying to turn Bitcoin into .....

I just want to say for the record that I think it is sometimes possible to
negotiate and compromise on certain ideas or coding tweaks or whatever,
between developers and miners/v-nodes/etc when it could satisfy all
parties within reason. We should always strive to attempt to accommodate
different parties and incorporate them when we can, so that we can all
move forward together. But that is not an absolute.

With things like the "scaling debate/ softfork or hardfork issue" what it
really comes down to is security and nothing else, IMO. Though it is
important to try to accommodate any opposing party and attempt to bring
them back into the fold, this is not always possible. Some issues can not be
compromised on, not because one party doesn't want to or is purposefully
fucking around, but because it is a fundamental of the system.

So IMO, there are times where "compromises" are possible and should be
entertained, but this current issue is not one of them. We have reached
an important "fork in the road" in Bitcoin's history and the community
and certain parties will need to make a direction decision eventually.

The blockchain system is a settlement system as designed. With settlement, there
is technically a winning party and losing party. That is what protects us from
doublespends within our system. It is not actually cash-like, but more like checks.
My statement, that you highlighted in red, refers to there being a single chain and
that there will be a winning chain and a losing chain. You could say that the blockchain
also prevents "doublechains" (in theory). So by it's nature, compromises are
not acceptable. It is one or the other.

Anyway, you could say that Satoshi actually created a P2P E-Checking System.
Because he called it "E-Cash" doesn't make it so. Sometimes he even called it "E-Gold".
So which one is it? E-Cash, E-Checks, or E-Gold? Satoshi didn't even know himself,
and said what he believed at that moment of time. He was learning with all of us and
his paper was not a final product, but the final product of his solo work. The whitepaper
was his attempt to convince others of the merit, not its perfection.

If you actually paid attention to what he wrote afterwards, instead of just the whitepaper,
you will understand that he was trying to solve larger issues and the E-Cash/Gold
component was just one little part of the whole. Sometimes his answers were great
and other times his answers ignored major faults. Whatever the correct answers are,
it surely is not "the whitepaper", since that is a 8+ year old proposal that Satoshi
prepared only for peer review and consideration. It was not perfected. For example,
the whitepaper doesn't even contain all the details about number of coins, blockheights,
halvings and etc. That all came after the whitepaper. So Satoshi wrote E-Cash in the
whitepaper, but programmed E-Gold into the protocol.

So, if you have a problem that people are not following the "principles of the original
whitepaper" you should write a PM/Email to Satoshi and ask him why he himself
violated those principles with his own first client design/protocol.

Strictly speaking, when the miners raised the block limit they accepted, in the past, from, say, 500 KB to 1 MB, that WAS a hard fork.  Each time the miners changed the actual size of blocks they accepted to make, they applied a de facto hard fork.  A hard fork has nothing to do with what piece of code is actually compiled, it is what are the *actual* de facto rules at a given point that are applied, and whether a newly allowed block would have passed the de facto rules in the past.  When miners were making only 500 KB blocks, if ever a 1 MB block were made, it would have been rejected at that point by his peers, while that same block is now accepted.  Hence, each time the miners rose their mutually agreed-upon accepted limit on block size, that WAS already a hard fork. 
Hard forks have nothing to do with code, but have to do with what the miners actually mutually accept (of course, it must be somewhere in some form of code, they don't do it by hand).  They didn't accept 1 MB blocks 5 years ago, now they do (at least, as far as I understand).  So that clearly is a hard fork.

Also, one must understand that the reversal of every soft fork, is a hard fork.  This means that if one accepts soft forks, and one accepts the idea of "potentially going back to what it was in case of disaster", one accepts the idea of a hard fork too.

The only fundamental difference between a soft fork, and a hard fork, is that a soft fork never gives the choice to the user in the market.  If a miner majority is reached with a soft fork, other miners are FORCED to follow, and at no point, there are two chains from which a user can chose in the market and vote with his money.  With a (bilateral) hard fork, in principle, two prongs can emerge, and users can vote with their money in the market.
In other words, if you are afraid of the market, never accept hard forks.

Sweet Jesus the replies are long on this one. I see this is a passionate topic, I'll keep it short and sweet.

It's obviously political at this point. Members are all heavily invested in btc, and decisions made about the protocol tend to preserve the wealth /interest of the board, not the populace. It's money, folks, and cronyism/greed is slowing down the innovation worse than regulation.

My idea is that we simply see immutability at work.  The fact that the thing is decentralized for the moment, that Core lost its central authority, and that there's no way any more to change anything to the existing immutable protocol - until bitcoin will centralize again, maybe through a consortium of miners having majority hash rate, and there will be again a central boss of bitcoin.

What seems to be "idiotic wars", is in my opinion nothing else but the mutual antagonism that doesn't allow consensus to arise over "cheating on the rules" - something that could be called an attack, but which is also applicable to any other change to the rules: the antagonism that divides miners not to collude over "changing history on the block chain" (in other words, the "51% attack") is the same antagonism that doesn't allow them to change protocol, without an orchestrated simultaneous move, hence "protecting" the rules of the system.

Strictly speaking you are very wrong.
The blocksize was capped at 1MB and what you are referring to is the "soft cap"
and is neither a hardfork or a softfork. You are very wrong that a block made larger
than the soft cap would have been invalidated, in fact, some miners made larger blocks
while other still mined at the lower soft cap levels. It took weeks and weeks for the
developers to get the miners to raise the cap because they didn't want to or knew
that they could. So I don't know where you are getting this nonsense.

You are wrong in many of your statements and your interpretation of words and
events are incorrect. A softfork needs 95% miner consensus, so the other miners
that are "FORCED" are 5% acceptable loss which quickly follows. In comparison,
in a hardfork, you need 95% of Miners and Verifying nodes, which is near impossible,
since some hardfork proposals themselves directly disenfranchise verifying nodes, thus
you can not normally get high verifying node consensus. The Softfork attempts to
preserve those verifying nodes, while still allowing a new feature upgrade enforced
by the miners themselves. Needing users to vote makes no sense, since the average
user has no mechanism to vote other than to run a verifying node and that is
unnecessary for softforks since the changes in a softfork are still "within the rules"
of the system. Verifying nodes only need to vote, technically, when you add something
that violates a prior rule.

Another problem with your argument, you say that bilateral hardforks are good because
the users get to choose with their money. The problem with that argument is that it
assumes Bitcoin is like a corporation that needs customers. In reality, that is what you
may want Bitcoin to become, but that is not what Satoshi envisioned. Bitcoin has one
job to do with one chain and it is either doing it well or not. The markets have no place
with the Bitcoin protocol, only security. If the markets had the power, they would destroy
security and corrupt the system the same way they corrupted the world system with
illusions. All human markets are manipulated, yet you haven't learned that lesson from
Satoshi's idea yet. Your arguments are advocating for the degradation of Bitcoin.

Ah, I thought that it was a mutually respected rule, sorry then.  I didn't know that during the period when the "soft cap" was 500 KB, there were miners making larger blocks.  Why did miners restrict themselves then to 500 KB ?  You are saying that it is pure ignorance/incompetence on their side ?


No, a soft fork doesn't need 95% miner consensus.  That is an extra mechanism that has been applied to past soft forks in bitcoin, but the dynamics of mining doesn't make that necessary.  As we saw, on litecoin, it was set at 75%.

A soft fork, by definition, is a change in *de facto protocol* that makes potentially correct blocks under the old protocol invalid under the new protocol, but is such that all potentially correct blocks under the new protocol are also correct under the old one.  For instance, black-listing an address is an example of a soft fork.  Rejecting any block that contains a transaction with that address, while before, such a block would be accepted, is typically a soft fork.

A hard fork, by definition, is a change in the *de facto protocol* that makes potentially correct blocks under the new protocol invalid under the old protocol.  There are two variants, here: bilateral (that is, the correct blocks under the old protocol will also be invalid under the new one) or unilateral (the correct blocks under the old protocol are still considered valid by the new protocol).

A soft fork, and an unilateral hard fork, are each-other's time reversals, so any undone soft fork is an unilateral hard fork (for instance, removing an address from a black list is an unilateral hard fork).

As to the needs for miner consensus for it to work dynamically, depending on the kinds of fork, we have 3 situations:

A) soft fork:
if a majority of miners applies a soft fork, then the minority of miners is forced to follow, because all old protocol blocks they will make, will end up being orphaned, as they accept the forked blocks themselves, and hence cannot build an own chain.  A minority of soft forking miners will always mine themselves on "old blocks" and hence orphan themselves out of business.    So with a soft fork, there's always only one chain, and the majority imposes its will on the minority.


B) bilateral hard fork:
Whatever the ratio of miners picking one or the other protocol, two independent chains emerge, all users get "double coins" and if exchanges allow so (list both chains), users can vote with their money ; miner revenue vs difficulty will be such, that the hash rate will adapt to the market valuations of both chains.   Bitcoin has an extra problem here for the minority chain, which is the slow difficulty adjustment, making the minority chain grow very slowly.
In this case, there's no forcing minorities: each has its own chain.  The market votes.

C) unilateral hard fork:
Only when the forkers have majority, they can split off.  If they are minority, they get orphaned because they don't build on each other fast enough.  So if the old protocol is majority, they cannot fork away.  If the old protocol is minority, they can fork away, but the old protocol can remain as an independent fork.  We are then in situation B, but the danger is that if ever the market votes for the old protocol, the new chain will be taken over at a certain point, and be entirely orphaned (even after, say, a month or so) and all transactions in the new coin are gone.  Unilateral forks are hence extremely dangerous.

In all of this, non mining nodes count for zilch.  But in B and C, USERS in the market count a lot (whether they have a full node or not).

As someone who "supports" segwit on it's merits, and a 2Mb block increase for compromise, I have yet to see any compelling argument for this. Can someone point me to something I can read and digest that would actually accomplish that plus something that refutes that. I'm not talking about things that are filled with propaganda and ideology but solid arguments based on technical issues and facts etc.

No, the only rule is 1MB (protocol) and the "soft cap" is the miners own code on their
own miner. As blocks became more full, people asked the miners to raise their
"soft caps". Prior to this act, most miners didn't know they could raise their soft cap.
At this time, large miners are mining away not paying attention to the communities or
anything. They just maintain their rigs, repair them, watch them, collect the btc, and
feed their families. It is only recently that they have begun to start participating in the
communities and asserting their perceived power, which mainly comes from what some
have told them and not actual experience.




On systems as large as Bitcoin, you want something safe like 95% to ensure that no
second chain will survive. At 75%, and a contentious proposal, 25% loss is not safe
and could allow the "old chain" to survive. Maybe on litecoin that number was alright,
since there isn't billions involved plus they knew no miner would bother with a second
litecoin chain, but Bitcoin is different. We must assume there are malicious or idealistic
actors who will attempt to preserve the "old chain", 95% is the safest, allegedly.




I don't know if I agree. A blacklisting as you describe doesn't need a soft or hard fork.
The miners could just have a list of UTXOs that their government deems to be illegal,
and it would be illegal for them to accept that UTXO into their blocks. Thankfully, in
this case, mining isn't fully centrlzied within one nation, so in theory, that UTXO can
be moved by a miner who is not under that country's jurisdiction.

In the event that code is added to enforce a blacklisting on all miners, I think that
might need a hardfork, but I am not sure really. I assume the code must be changes
so that miner have reference to dirty UTXOs within the protocol, which would be a
hardfork. I could be wrong though.



I agree in theory.
The difference between the two (softfork v unilateral hardfork) is that verifying nodes
do not need to upgrade under a softfork, but do need to under the hardfork.




I agree in theory.




I disagree. In this situation, influences outside of consensus and the markets will
come into play. There are malicious and idealistic parties who are waiting for this
opportunity. For example, malicious actors will Ddos and attack the miners and
exchanges on either chains in order to influence the markets. What the users may
actually want, can be perverted and prevented by allowing "the markets" to decide.
All markets are manipulated and will be manipulated. Basically, it would not be a fair
vote since attackers will come from all corners of the earth. In this case, we can rig it
so the least worthy chain, that the users hate and don't want, can get the most hash
and perceived value. So in this way, I think bilateral hardforks could be more
dangerous than unilateral hardforks.



I disagree. Any hardfork is contingent upon both miners and verifying nodes having
high consensus. Non-mining nodes only count for "zilch" when it is a Softfork. Otherwise,
verifying nodes are a complementary consensus structure in all hardfork types.

When you talk about "users"  voting and done so through the exchanges, that vote needs
to be determined before any fork occurs, not after. Users voting after the fork has occurred
is backwards and makes no sense. Relying on the markets is an illusion since they can be
manipulated so that it seems the users want one thing, when they are all voting for another.

Satoshi created Bitcoin because these market systems are manipulatible. We can not now
fall back on these flawed systems to determine the future of Bitcoin that rejected those
old ways. It is contradictory IMO.

I think that before even be able to discuss that, the real question should be answered, without politics, but purely on rational, logical grounds:

"what is the real power of non-mining nodes ?"

My personal stance on this, which I think I have *rationally proved* but I'm open of course to any pointing out of an error in my proof, is that the answer to this is essentially "zilch".
I put some caveats on this, and I'm not saying that running a full node is *useless*, but:

1) only for its owner (knowledge of how bitcoin is actually working, deniability of IP address vs own transactions)

2) can help network if direct internet links between users and mining pool nodes are, for one or another reason, not functioning

3) serves as some "back up memory" if ever a big catastrophy eliminates all miner nodes, to be able to "start bitcoin up again".

But as "guardians of the protocol", their power is zilch, and hence as "decentralizing power element" their influence is zilch.  

That's my position on this for the moment, not because of any politics, but because I think I established the proof of it rationally.  Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe someone can pinpoint where the proof goes wrong.  I'm not going to repeat it, I've formulated it often.

Now, this question is important, because it is this aspect which makes people say that big blocks are "dangerous for centralisation".    My idea is that before the size of the blocks becomes an issue, the REAL centralizing force, which is economics of scale in the PoW scheme, which separated bitcoin's system into a "provider and customer" model, had much, much more centralizing influence.

Indeed, any industrialized PoW transforms a crypto currency network in two separate entities:
a) a decentralized factory of block chain (the mining pools and their subcontractors, the mining hardware owners), that "produces block chain" and "sells coins on it"

b) users that use that block chain to do their transactions, and buy the coins of (a) for good money.

This is not the case for a PoS coin for instance, where there's an intimate link between coin *owners* and the produced ledger.

A PoW ledger is essentially a kind of "notary service" that is sold to people that want to "get data written down and published": this is the product that the decentralized miner industry sells, and they have their "privilege" by the hardware investment they made ; this is different from a PoS ledger, where the investment is in the system itself, and not externally, making the separation between "ledger provider" and "ledger user" impossible, as it happens on industrialized PoW ledgers.

The bitcoin miners both from different codes including the core developers will be put to the edges and will agree to something when bitcoin is already at the brink of extinction. Later this year a new cryptocurrency will replace bitcoin if it cannot solve its internal problems. Just like bitcoin this coin has already made some move to establish fiat exchanges across the globe and it hope to replace bitcoin.

The question here is simply: does the soft cap only apply to the own produced block, or does it also enter into account to checking which blocks are considered valid by others ?  If it is an own produced block, it is not a fork ; if it also applies to the validation rules of other blocks, it is a fork.


If it is a true soft fork, no.  The 25% will not survive, it will be orphaning itself all the time, as I explained further.  95% is a wise rule, however, if you want to have no contention, but purely dynamically, 51% is enough.



I don't know if I agree. A blacklisting as you describe doesn't need a soft or hard fork.
[/quote]

Of course it is a soft fork.  A block containing that transaction was valid before, and isn't any more, and will hence be rejected.  
Forking has to do with *protocol*, not with *software* per se.  It has to do with the set of accepted and non-accepted blocks, no matter what is the mechanism of acceptation, whether this is in the "core software", or an extra selection script, or whatever.  It has to do with the *actual practice* of miners that decide *on which previous block to build* and *which blocks to reject/orphan/....* (not build on it).  Whatever is the mechanism of that choice, doesn't matter.  The actual choice is what is the actual protocol.



It would nevertheless be a genuine fork, and the dynamics of forking would apply.  If a majority of miners would reject all blocks containing that address, then this soft fork would be imposed upon the network, simply because if other miners (minority) make such a block (include such a transaction), the majority hash rate will not build on their block and it will be rejected/orphaned.  As the other miners do accept the black-listing miners, the "orphaned chain" will not grow, because they will continue building on the longest chain.  Hence, if 55% of miners decide to blacklist addresses, these are EFFECTIVELY blacklisted.


But, as I think I pointed out, "verifying code" doesn't matter if you're not a miner.  If there's only one chain out there, you accept it, or you stop.  That's your choice as a "verifier".  You know that the unique chain out there is not in agreement with what is required by your verification, and that's it.

I've read a lot of your posts on this and you've failed to convince me except in the case where 100% of the miners are in agreement and in opposition to a very large majority of those running full nodes.

If, for example, 75% (hash) of the miners decide to change something radical about the protocol, the full nodes can choose to reject their blocks while accepting those from 25% of the miners. Yes, the entire system is disrupted for some period of time but it was going to be anyway.

All this is just a matter of "the markets decide".  I try to avoid all forms of moral judgement like "fair", "malicious", etc... and I try to understand the dynamics of the system.  After all, in a trustless system, there's no notion of "fair" or anything: it is whatever happens, and "all is permitted" because nothing is to be trusted.   But then it is important to understand how such system behaves under all thinkable circumstances, as all is permitted.

So when I say "the users decide in the market", that includes all effects such as DDoS, attacks, and everything that goes with it and is the natural environment for trustless systems, because the market decides, taking into account these happenings and how the systems react to it.


But that's part of a market, especially an unregulated one.  So that is part of the choice.


I think I've argued and presented enough proof that this is not the case.  Maybe my proof is wrong, and someone can finally pinpoint an error in it.


No, of course not.  The proof of the pudding is the eating.  Toyota didn't want a vote first before it put cars on the market, to compete with General Motors (say).  The only true vote is the one in the market.  Other votes are "free" and hence unreliable.  If you have to vote with money, you vote for real.


Satoshi cannot alter the laws of nature, and game theory.  I could just as well try to invent a system where gravity doesn't make you fall.  If something is designed to go against the laws of nature, it will do something, but it will not do what you intended.  I think bitcoin is doing something, but not what it was intended (or at least, the publicly announced intentions).  

Just need to form a few people authority and makes the change, it's not difficult. The problem is that each has his own ego and interest, and it definitely hinders the development and usage of the bitcoin.

I agree with you, but in that case, it are STILL NOT the full nodes that decide one way or another, but the users in the market *with their money*, not with their nodes.  If the users sell in majority the coins on the 75% chain, and buy the coins on the 25% chain (remember that from the start, all users have equal amounts of both), what will happen ?

A) the exchanges listing both coins will make a lot of money on the transactions (so, yes, they will list both coins).

B) users will NEED TO TRANSACT on both chains.  So if all nodes block one chain, they will find a way to connect directly to the miner nodes, and exchanges (see A) will do so too.  

C) in the end, coins on the user-preferred chain will be worth much more than those on the user-rejected chain (offer and demand in the exchange happening in A).

D) miners will adapt their hash rate to the most profitable chain, until this finds an equilibrium: it will find an equilibrium when hash rates agree with market price.  As long as an expensive chain has little hash rate, it becomes interesting for miners to start mining that chain, the forkers on the 25% chain will make a lot of money ;  a cheap chain with a lot of hash rate (and difficulty) will not be advantageous to mine, the 75% miners will be mining at loss.  So miners will follow market price.

That's exactly what happened with the ETH/ETC split (ok, the miners didn't initially go in majority to the small chain, true)
And whatever was the ratio of full nodes doesn't matter in this.  Users voting in the market determined all.

Now, in bitcoin, there's an extra difficulty, which is the very slow difficulty adjustment rule.  Unless that is adapted in the fork too (could be), any split will bring initially the "low miner count" chain in difficulties, because they will only be able to mine a few blocks.  But also the majority chain will slow down.  This is what keeps unity between miners, and which wasn't the case on ethereum.

Right, but I never said full nodes are the only ones that decide one way or another, you're saying that and then saying the conclusion is that they thus have zero power. You've simply failed to convince me that full nodes have zero power. It's more like a 3 tier system. Everything is fine as long as everyone agrees with what the miners are doing. If they don't, it's bumped up to the full nodes and from there it can continue up to the final level of users. At the end of the day, it's a combination of all 3 that will finally settle on some sort of resolution.

They have self and selfish thoughts, they never think for everyone. Bitcoin is in trouble, and it needs resolution. Hardfork is very necessary.

Then I don't know how to convince you.  How could one establish the proof that entities X have no power of decision on outcome U ?  I would think that if one proves that if outcome U is largely independent of whatever X does, the proof is established, no ?

Of course, we cannot do real experiments, but Gedanken experiments are good enough if we take into account all logical possibilities, and eliminate only those that can be agreed upon to be highly improbable.  That's an accepted practice in many fields of study.

As such, I think I established that even in the extreme case where ALL non-mining nodes disagree with a miner protocol, that miner protocol can nevertheless be the actual one on the block chain.  You already agreed with me that this was true when all miners (like they are used to do) have a common protocol and didn't deviate from it.  In that case, there's only one block chain out there, and full nodes can accept it, or can stop.  But they cannot FORCE miners to accept THEIR version of the protocol.

You raised the case when miners were not united, but a fraction went with the full nodes' protocol preference.  I just demonstrated that if the miners disagreed, then we have a hard fork, and there are now TWO CHAINS out there.  So in general, some full nodes will download chain A, and others will download chain B.  The most extreme case, is where all full nodes refuse one of both (say, refuse A), and ONLY download B.  I demonstrated that even in that extreme case, under reasonable assumptions of behaviour of exchanges and users, the relative values of both chains, with the eventuality of one actually going to zero, is entirely determined by what the market will do in this case, and AGAIN, the full nodes refusing chain A can very well result in chain A being the dominant one, if ever the market decides so.  So in the case you raised, too, whatever the full nodes tried to impose, has no effect on the outcome.

If that is not a sufficient proof that whatever full nodes do, they have no *decision power over the protocol* I don't know what could convince you.

Now, I will agree with you that they have some "psychological power before the split".  It may be a vague indication of what users MIGHT do if ever they were given a choice in the market.  But even that is very limited: full nodes are not representative of the market. They do not faithfully represent the stake owners, and they do not faithfully represent the traders.  They, especially, do not represent newcomers to bitcoin that will also vote in the market.  So their indicative power of what the market might do, is not necessarily of much value either.  It is only in the case where miners are very hesitant to fork off, and are too incompetent/lazy... to do a serious market study, that they might take full node preferences for a market study to base their decision to fork or not, on.

In any case, bitcoin is constructed such, that "forking away" is risky for miners, because of the slow difficulty adjustment.  Miners need to know that they will fork off with big majority before attempting to do so.  So, if full nodes can influence anything, they may *increase the pressure on miners NOT to fork away*.  If ever full nodes in majority keep the old protocol, miners might take this as an indication that, if ever they fork away, the market will not support their initiative, and it will even be harder for them to fork away.
But at no point, full nodes could IMPOSE a CHANGE upon miners, if miners are not convinced that they will fork away with large majority of their peers, because in as much that full nodes are an indication of what the market would do (even though, as I said, this is highly doubtful because they are not representative), they STILL face the difficulty adjustment question.

edit: I would like to point out that I am not trying to do any politics here.  I simply see some claim that "to stop the Russians, we should all have plastic guns" and that a whole argument of how it is important to keep the number of plastic guns high, and how some measures cannot be taken because the number of plastic guns goes down.   Just by logic, my point is "plastic guns won't stop the Russians", and I try to argue all cases where plastic guns would be used to try to stop the Russians, and obviously fail if you think about it: if ever they are stopped, or not, it doesn't depend on holding plastic guns.
So I'm putting into question the argument that plastic guns are important, because it sounds obviously false to me.  That's all.  After I've listed several arguments, someone tells me "you've still not convinced me that plastic guns won't stop the Russians at all.  Of course, with ONLY plastic guns, we won't get there.  But I think they still play a role in stopping Russians".

So one of the problems I have with your "logic", is that half of the time you come up with these 1 + 1 equal 2 equations that ignores some other factor or is based on multiple assumptions, some of which can be flawed.

Outcome U is only accomplished because X "put" the decision into the hands of Y. So if ultimately you believe that the ability to do that still does not mean they have any power what so ever, then that's where we will never agree no matter what sort of "logic' you try and throw at it.

I also find your statement that full nodes are not representative of the market truly perplexing. While we don't know the entire makeup, it's clear that a good portion of those full nodes are exchanges, payment processors, companies, traders and users. So how one then can possibly say that they're not representative of the market is just.. well I can't think of a good word for it.

I suspect what this comes down to is, if you are predisposed to believe (or want it to be true) that full nodes have no power, then all they can do is "influence" through action as you believe. But others believe that the ability to perform an action that "influences" things the way you want is, ultimately, power.

As for your plastics guns analogy. When you throw things like that out there I end up questioning your sincerity. You take some non applicable analogy and then basically imply that anyone that thinks this is true is not logical. i.e. implying they're "crazy". Throwing in the "I'm not being political" prior to that further makes it appear that you're not sincere and are just trying to advance some agenda.

Anyway. I think it's safe to say that neither of us will be able to convince each other one way or the other.

DINO!

.. It's all about TRUST.

If I run a full node - I DON'T NEED TO TRUST ANYONE.

You say it's like a 'plastic' gun. But this is not true.

I cannot be forced by any amount of miners to accept an invalid chain. They cannot spend coins they don't own. The ONLY power they have is to NOT include valid txns. That's a pretty powerful toy I have (a full node).

If 'most' of the miners jump on to a different spec, say BU, Me and my full node can choose not to, and the remaining miners including MYSELF, can keep our chain running. I'll start mining if need be (and if I can make some money). Without TRUSTING ANYONE.

The minute I HAVE to jump ship, because I am not running a full node, so cannot determine for myself what chain to run, BTC is dead.

Yes - Miners make the chain, but any chain requires miners, and Bitcoin has excellent self regulation built in!

If miners leave I can join. If miners join, inefficient miners leave. if Txn/s is too high and blocks are full, the fee's go up. if TXN/s too low, the fees come down. ALL OF THIS self regulated by market forces.

Running a full node, means you are FREE to do what you want. When the time comes, you may need to mine. You may not.

But this is only possible - IF you run a full node.

Otherwise, if BTC becomes JUST FOR BIG FAT MINERS - It's no better than a Chinese version of VISA. Only much slower, inefficient and more expensive.. Then I have ZERO power AND I need to TRUST the miners (since I can't leave..)..  No thanks.

Well, I invite you to point them out.


Nobody "put power" in the hands of anyone.  This is a dynamical system, with its different behavioural laws.  Like in nature, nobody "put the power of decision in the hands of this or that species".  Or like the solar system: the laws of gravity tell the planets how to move.  Nobody "gave the sun the power to decide where the planets go".  When you study the system, you try to find the different behaviours of the components as a function of the behaviour of the other components in the system.  Once you understand that, you can try to predict how any change in behaviour of one component, influences the behaviour of another component.   That's all.  


Well, there are more than a million of bitcoin users.  There are about 7000 full nodes.  Clearly they are not representative.  As one can start up as many nodes as one wishes, and as this is totally not related to what one does on the market, it must be rather clear that there is no causal link between what happens on the market, and what nodes are running what, no ?
Take exchanges.  I think we can agree that exchanges will see a mega profit if ever bitcoin splits in a hard fork, because many users are going to trade one of their coin copies, for the other.  So even if an exchange is now only running a node that goes with, say, "fork A", of course they will quickly fire up a node that goes with fork B to be able to have their customers trade both of them (and have them reap in the fees on all of these trades).  So a big exchange having a node that only runs protocol pre-cursor A, doesn't mean, at all, that they won't start another node for fork B.

As to users, suppose there is a hard fork by miners (that was YOUR proposal).  Do you really think that if you are a whale, and you have, say, 100 000 BTC, and after the split, you have now 100 000 BTC-A and of course also 100 000 BTC-B, that you will *refuse the value of your BTC-B holdings* by refusing to transact on chain B ?  Do you think people will "throw away free money" because they are now running a node with only one software flavour ?


But this is a purely technical question, which has a reasoned answer, it is not a matter of belief.  My "belief" comes from argued thinking about what happens or what is likely to happen in different scenarios, not from any predisposition to anything.  I'm trying to understand how this system works in reality, what components have influence on what, and for that, I suppose that these components change their behaviour, and I try to find out what are the propagated consequences of this change in behaviour.  That's how you find out how something works.


These discussions always end up like that: no logical argument. (*)  I wonder if in bitcoin land, someone actually thinks logically.  As I told you, I saw a claim that seemed to go against how the bitcoin dynamics was established: proof of work was established to avoid any Sybil attack by nodes.  As such, anything that doesn't do proof of work was designed not to have any influence on the system.  But of course, it is not because it was DESIGNED that way, that it WORKS that way.  So, even though bitcoin's design was such that non-mining full nodes were not to have any influence, it could still be the case that they DID have, in practice, some influence.  But when analysing on how they could enforce anything, it seems that the design of the bitcoin system was correct: non-mining nodes, do, indeed, have no influence.  

So it is quite strange that the argument to the opposite is even used.  Bitcoin was explicitly designed NOT to let any influence to full nodes, and moreover, if you think about it, and try to find out if, nevertheless, they COULD have some influence, you find out that all arguments point out that, no, they don't, as was expected (but not proved initially) from the design.


You can perfectly well convince me with a logical argument: you describe a situation where the full nodes enforce their protocol upon the block chain - which is after all the claim that you believe.  If every step in your argument is correct and plausible, then I'm convinced, because then, the confrontation of your arguments with mine will show where one of us is wrong.  That's how science is done, usually.

(*) edit: the "plastic gun analogy" was of course not a logical argument.  It was an illustration of how I saw the situation.  The plastic gun analogy didn't prove anything, the real proof was earlier.  Once it was established by logical reasoning that there's no significant way in which full nodes can enforce their protocol, it makes them look like plastic guns.  But not before of course.  Analogies are not logical arguments, and it wasn't used as such in this case.  They are just illustrative, after the logical argument has been given.

Yes, this I give you.  I never denied this.  A full node INFORMS ITS OWNER.  But that is not the claim.  If you are informed that the sole block chain out there is not to be trusted according to your node, what do you do now ?

Then, by definition, you are not a non-mining full node any more !  You joined the miners, and you are now using your hash power to fork.  I hope you are not on your own, because otherwise, your chain is going to grow slowly, and you will probably get nowhere.  So the only reasonable case we are discussing here, is when there is already a split between the miners and in fact, what you are doing, doesn't matter much.
If you do so, there's a hard fork, and we're now in the case I replied to before, two coins will appear on the exchanges, and users will vote with their money, and miners will follow.  In all of this, NON-MINING full nodes didn't play a role.  And hey, you WILL also transact on the OTHER chain, because you have coins there, and you will want to dump them.

In the end, whether you were running your full node or not, doesn't change anything: the users in the market will determine the relative market caps and hence, the relative hash rates on both chains.  That's my whole point.

It is, in other words, NOT because you were running a non-mining full node that you influenced what so ever in this split.  It is because you started mining, or because you sold in the market.  The only thing that happened, was that your full node informed you at a certain point, that the chain you expected to see, disappeared.  In the case of a split, you wouldn't even know: your full node would just crunch on the chain that is in agreement, and neglect the other one.  You wouldn't even know that there was a split.

Dino - I know it must seem like we are just dancing around in circles..  ;)..  And I am sorry for that.. BUT.. I have to disagree with you.

A network of FULL nodes can maintain a fully working blockchain, some will mine some won't, that others can join.. it is self determinate and complete. An SPV network can't and isn't.
 
There is a qualitative difference between these two scenarios. That difference matters. That's it.

..

..I am not convinced that I am conveying the subtlety of this paradigm. My fault.

I was working on a long response and just trashed it all.

So let me re-iterate in what I hope is the simplest way I can. Your statement is that full nodes have zero power, "zilch" so they might as well "all" be shut off. The "full nodes have zero power" is what I'm talking about, not your statements where you start to add qualifiers. You have failed to convince me that it's true.

Let's just use an example where 75% of miners want to increase the emissions back up to a starting point of 50 coins/block.

The market won't like that but they have no ability to reject that protocol change. They might drive the price into the tank for awhile, but they've proven time and again that as long as they see they can continue to make money, they'll do so and so will end up just accepting it.

Full-nodes however, can reject those blocks, accept the 25% and bring about a split in the network etc. Now the market has the ability to ultimately make the final decision. Yes, there will be chaos and the outcome would be unknown, but now it's in their hands.

So that means full nodes have zero power?

Uh, of course full nodes are needed.  But only mining ones are strictly needed, because they are the ones that make the block chain, the others don't, and hence they are the sole primary SOURCE of data - there isn't any other one.  What doesn't make the block chain, cannot influence it.  All decisions in a crypto currency are acted into the block chain, and that block chain is the only thing that represents that crypto currency, nothing else (for instance, not the communications protocol), because the block chain is the only cryptographic element in the system.   So all decisions are acted in the block chain. If you can't write a piece of data in that block chain, you have no technical decision power.

As a user, you can ask those people that write the block chain, to put something in there for you (one of your transactions).  That's how you are a *customer* of those that make the block chain.  As a user, you may want to spend good money to induce others to put something in there (one of their transactions to you).  As such, you have economical decision power, like any customer has.  In order to exercise your economical power, you need to be able to READ (parts of the) block chain.  So you need read access ; however, the block chain's cryptographic nature is that you can entirely verify the economic acts that concern YOU by only obtaining a small part of the data (SPV).  In fact, the only thing you need to verify is whether transactions in your favour are correctly notified in the block chain, so that you can know that you can transact them yourself later.  There must be hence some few accessible places where you can obtain those data, but as these data cannot be cryptographically faked, and as the only place they can come from, are active miners, these active miners are the sole primary source of these data.  Whether you access a copy of a copy of these data, or you access them directly from the source, doesn't matter, it doesn't increase the "security" of the system at all from being able to read a copy, if you can have the original.

But this is your error: non-mining full nodes don't have to reject or accept this.  The miners themselves (the miner pool nodes) already did.  The split was already there when the miner pools split. There were full MINING nodes broadcasting each of the chains, and these are the ONLY TWO SOURCES of the two chains that exist.

Let us call the, say, 6 pools that make the 75% "50 coins" chain, chain A and protocol A, and the 12 pools that make the 25% old protocol chain, chain B, and protocol B.

My statement is that indeed, all non-mining nodes might just as well be shut down, from the moment that the pools have sufficiently strong data center full nodes that everyone of us can connect to them directly.

Suppose now that you have an SPV wallet, and let us presume that the split doesn't affect the communication with the SPV wallet.  If you connect your SPV wallet to one of the A-type pool nodes (MINING nodes), you will see your havings on that chain ; if you transact, you transact on that chain (let us presume that something is in place to avoid replay attacks, like a version number or something that alters the signatures).  For instance, you can send them to an exchange that lists both coins, and sell them for LTC.
However, if you connect your SPV wallet to the B-type pool nodes (MINING nodes), you will see your (initially identical) holdings on that chain.  Your coins will still be there, even though you sold your A-type coins for litecoin.  

Of course, if Joe, your neighbour, has a full node that he configures for protocol A, you can also use his node, that copies the chain from type-A pool nodes ; and if your other neighbour, Jack, has a full node that he configures for protocol B, you can use his node that copies the chain from type-B pool nodes.  But they are just copies of the one or the other.  If Joe and Jack aren't there, you can directly connect your SPV wallet to the sources of these data without using them as a proxy.  And if you feel like it, you can run both nodes in your basement, and copy both block chains.  But the only sources of chain A and chain B are the type-A mining nodes, and the type-B mining nodes.  You can get copies if you want, or you can use copies from neighbours if they are around.


Yes, because the markets didn't need non-mining full nodes, as they could do it with the mining nodes that are the source of the data and are the processors of transactions in any case.

Now, this is an interesting market, because the miners of A have 4 times more coins than the miners of B for each block.  So if the market would split into putting 4 times less value on coin A than on coin B, the miners would eventually switch to a 50%/50% hash rate split, because then, earnings per hash rate are in equilibrium again.  In order for the 75% / 25% split to be maintained, coin A would have to have more than 1/2.3 the market value than coin B.

What about the technical decision power to reject a block ?


What if I can't find someone to give me a copy ? The centralised miners could be coerced into wiping the old chain.. ( If I run a full node I never have to ask anyone for anything.. )

You can reject it yourself from your own hard disk, that's about it.



Then you will in any case not be able to transact anything, because no miner is around to accept your transaction.  You cannot write yourself your transaction to the block chain you have on your own disk if you are a non-mining node.  So if you cannot find ANY miner that has a running node, you cannot do anything with your block chain on your own node either, because NOBODY can add a block, including you.  

Note that I did put a caveat of the catastrophe where all miner nodes were destroyed, bombed.... and that you are the one keeping the sole copy of the bitcoin block chain, then after 5 years you may indeed decide to restart bitcoin, if enough miners build again enough hash power to take up where it had been left.

If globally, ALL miners (you can't find a single one with the right block chain) have erased the old chain and make a new one, in any case, your old chain on your node is useless.  You sync with them, and forget the old chain or you stop.  You can only have transactions on a block chain that a miner is currently making.

As such, whatever you have on your own node, you'll have to adapt to what that miner is having on HIS node if you want him to write something to the chain HE's making.

My error was in throwing out some scenario in the hopes of simplifying in order to try and get you to just focus on the question. So I'll reword things and try again.

Full nodes undertake a "UASF" and only accept blocks from the miners that are signaling for segwit and thus bring about a fork.

Now the market has the ability to ultimately make the final decision. Yes, there will be chaos and the outcome would be unknown, but now it's in their hands.

So that means full nodes have zero power?

Well, then these nodes will stop if the block chain has a single block on it not signalling segwit.  If you want to use that node, you cannot do any transactions any more.  If you would start such node right now, it would simply stop at the first non-segwit signalling block.  It would find that the next block (segwit signalling) is not one built on the last one that is valid according to him, and will never find any other block any more that suits him.  So he stops.    But the miners don't stop.  They continue to make the chain like they make it today.  

What's the difference between running such a stopped node left behind, and switching off the machine on which it runs ?

People (users) wanting to transact coins, will avoid your full node to connect their SPV wallet to, because your node is not at the current height.   If all non-mining nodes do so, it is as if all of them switched off.  So users will ultimately only connect to miner nodes.  In a certain way, this looks somewhat like a sybil attack on the P2P network, by introducing a lot of nodes that have wrong data (stopped chains).  But as we know, the P2P network doesn't mind Sybil attacks.  Users wanting to transact will quickly blacklist them, to only connect to up-to-date nodes - ultimately, the miner pool data centers.

Suppose that an exchange installs such a node.  Suddenly, its customers cannot withdraw any more or cannot deposit any more.  I'm sure they are going to like it !  They will all run to an exchange that keeps accepting withdrawals and deposits.  They will convert all their holdings on the former exchange to LTC, ripple or ETH, withdraw, and deposit on the exchange that keeps allowing bitcoin transactions on the sole chain that exists.  And never go back to the former exchange again.  (*)

Note that nobody can "vote in the market" as long as there is a single block chain, because you only have wallets that work, and wallets that don't work.  Users, and exchanges, will prefer wallets that work.

(*) come to think of it, an exchange might very well do this temporarily, to make its customers sell their BTC they cannot withdraw for cheap, to switch back to a normal node afterwards, and reap in the difference !

That's based on the assumption that at least some of the miners that are currently signaling for segwit would not "switch" (at some point at least)  to build the "segwit" blockchain. I hate using phrases like "their best economic interest" as most take short term gains and sacrifice or risk long term what's best for their economic interests. But in this case there would be some that see it as being in their best economic interest to join in the "UASF".

 So taking this to the conclusion...that there will NEVER be a solution between the various flavors of devs on
block size and other issues in the future....

What is the outcome? Bitcoin just fades away as those same entrenched whales simply move BTC to another coin to fight over?

Or the price dumps to a point a fork does not matter?

If consensus has to be reached to move the development of bitcoin along.....what happens if that never gets enough traction
by any flavor of btc dev...to actually, work....

IN other words, decentralization and entrenchment ..means stagnation

stumped we are..

Bitcoin is not evil.


It turns out nobody owns bitcoin and it's difficult.  This is a feature of Bitcoin.  It's not a bug.

No, you are wrong. There will be a solution eventually. Both sides will push their luck to the end but one of them will not be able to endure anymore and retreat at some point.

This will most likely to happen when transaction fees become 20-30$ average and there are 400-500k unconfirmed transactions on the blockschain.

When all the hopes are lost, when everybody starts to dump bitcoin, when bitcoin heads back to 200$, when WU realizes that he is losing his job and then out of nowhere... The solution will arrive.  8)

We need to see the bottom first before we can jump to the moon again.

Miners have sunk costs.  They are invested and can't simply pull out their $3000, $6000 or $6000000 invested into sunk costs.  Mining is what makes BTC different than past efforts like PayPal and RipplePay.  I think it's very smart because those who have the most invested - and at stake - are those who guide the long-term solutions. 

If you hold $3000 in BTC, it'd be fairly easy to dump at $2200 and get some money back.  Mining operations would simply either turn off their miners if the price gets too low, which would reduce security, or start mining another SHA256 coin with lower difficulty and greater returns.  Mining is how you vote.

I am mining BU because the slow transaction times and high fees are reducing the quantity demanded, which keeps price down.  Bitcoin Unlimited is the *only* choice for that.  SegWit is to stop double spends and fix hash issues.  They've since said it can be 1.2MB, 2MB, 3MB ... 4MB.

At some point we will get to layer two, but we need to get layer one right and it's going to take time.  That's okay.

I agree on the perspective that network within the technology bring a huge or a big impact in regard to the transaction mostly offchain. Thinking that the core developers will think beyond the line in regard to transaction may be on the fact that most of transaction is been made in the principle of onchain because the control is the priority of the community or the developers wants to develop on bitcoin. So the scaling is sure to be implemented because it is much more needed for the users of bitcoin to used bitcoin in a daily basis.

Yep. You got it.

That's how you gonna end up when the shit hits the fan.

Bunch of worthless shitcoin miners or unemployed masses who hold thousands of worthless mining equipment in their garages. And one day, one of y'all BU supporters gonna say fuck it i'm going with SegWit.

Then two of y'all

Then four of y'all

Then ten of y'all

Then all of y'all will be mining Segwits.

As others have explained, there is no security provided to the network by non-mining ‘full nodes’.

That's the thing crisis will force a compromise. Miners are happy with moderate rises in price as is happening now because they can continue profiting from their mining operations while the difficulty doesn't take a sharp increase.

As soon as the shit hits the fan and prices start to plunge miners will have a choice either exit the market or compromise and it doesn't take a genius to realize compromise is their only choice.

Mining and "full nodes" are two different things.

Mining = https://shop.bitmain.com/ or https://canaan.io/

Full node = https://bitcoin.org/en/download or https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/download

Many who mine run full nodes.  One solves the puzzle and the other holds a copy of the blockchain. Both are security, but in different ways.

EDIT:  If people want to be paid for running a full node, there is a coin for that: DASH (https://www.dash.org/masternodes2/).


Maybe.  Or going from shitcoin to shitcoin and finding the best exchange into BTC, LTC or USD.  It'd take monitoring of the markets daily.  

SegWit only has one year and there are many other proposals, including BIP100, BIP101 and others.  The default is BIP9 and it will stay that way until most miners are satisfied with a solution.  Nobody owns nor controls Bitcoin.  That is the feature of it.  

Only BTC and LTC did not involve a pre-mine, that I know, and some central authority who owns tons of tokens.

Under newspeak, perhaps so. But according to Satoshi, nodes were miners.

?

The current chain is a succession of blocks that are signalling and not signalling Segwit.   All miners are still building the same block chain, one block on top of the other, some with a segwit signal, others without.  

For instance,
480 000 SW
480 001 SW
480 002 no SW
480 003 no SW
480 004 SW
480 005 SW
etc...

If you run a non-mining node that considers non-SW blocks as invalid, starting from 480 000, then that node will:

accept 480 000 (it is a SW block)
accept 480 001 (it is a SW block)

refuse 480 002: it is a non-SW block.

So it will wait until it finds a SUCCESSOR to block 480 001, but with SW signalling.

That block will never come.

Block 480 004 is the first SW block that comes along, but is not a successor to 480 001.  So it is rejected.  And all others following are rejected, because they are not a successor to 480 001.

The node stops.

That's about it.

When the unique chain is at 497 807, your node is still waiting for the block 480 001 with SW signalling.

A mining full node is a full node that not only holds a block chain, accepts other blocks from others according to its protocol rules, accepts broadcast transactions that come along but also constructs a new block from its mem pool on top of it according to his own rules, and broadcasts that new block.

This is actually the job of mining POOLS.  Individual "miners" are most probably hardware owners, that sell their hash rate to mem pools, to mine on the blocks that the mining POOL constructed according to its very own rules.

These nodes are the only "source of block chain".  They send out the originals.


Every PoS coin is like that.  DASH is half PoW, half PoS.  Peercoin, for instance, is full PoS.  That's the big difference between PoS and PoW: in PoS there's an intimate relationship between user and block chain builder ; in PoW, both notions are totally separated.

Again, you're basing that on an assumption. It will never come if all miners stop mining their current block when they receive the next one, i.e. they accept the next one no matter what. A miner that joins in the UASF will reject the next one if it's not signaling for segwit and continue mining his block.. So as far as he's concerned, he starts producing 100% segwit blocks. His chain never contains blocks from those that aren't signaling for segwit. And since he's broadcasting his blocks to the the nodes, those full nodes will take them and continue on. So of course it will come.

Ah, you mean, when the miner pools fork ?  So again, this has nothing to do with Joe running his UASF in his basement, but that miner pool deciding to fork.  We're back in the scenario where the miners fork: some build the classical chain, others build the Segwit chain.  If miners don't decide to fork, like right now, whether you run your blocked UASF node in your basement or not, will not change anything.  If on the other hand, miners do fork, whether you were running your node or not, didn't matter either.  And you don't even need to have such a node around: you can connect your wallet to one of the pure-segwit miners, and you have your coins on the segwit chain, or you can connect your wallet to one of the non-segwit miners, and you have your non-segwit coins.

So we have now two coins: the BTC-segwit coin, and the BTC-non-segwit coin.  Maybe exchanges will list the two coins.  If you want to transact, you will need the two kinds of chains.  But the two kinds of pools have them.  No worry.

And, AGAIN, the non-mining node wasn't involved in this split: it were the segwit miners that decided to fork, and gave rise to two different block chains.

And, again, this will be determined in the market.

Without the full nodes rejecting the non signaling segwit blocks, the miner would not have decided to forked. Without him forking, the market would not be able to determine the outcome.

So essentially your proof of power of full nodes is: full nodes have power over miners, because full nodes have power over miners.
No, seriously.  You talk about a "proof of power" and you assume in your proof what you need to prove :)

In fact, you *don't even need a UASF node* !  If miners decide to fork with a minority segwit chain, and they do this long enough, then this particular minority chain will be 100% segwit signalling.  If you force your core node to connect ONLY to these miner nodes and refuse to have it connect to any other peer in the network, then after a while, your node, not learning about any other block chain on the network, will see as the only chain, one which has been signalling segwit at 100% for long enough, and will ACTIVATE segwit.  From that point on, your node will reject non-segwit blocks, and you can now connect it to the whole network, it will refuse the longest chain as invalid, and continue to consider only the segwit minority chain.

Now suppose that I play a joke.  I launch 8000 UASF nodes (nodes don't cost much).  The minority of miners fork.  I let them mine for a while.   And now I switch off my UASF nodes.  Bam.  They have been mining on a short chain.  All transactions gone.  They've been wasting their hashing rate because some dude started many nodes and they believed it mattered.

IF miners think that it is in their advantage that there is a fork, they don't need to wait for UASF nodes.  And if they think it is risky to leave the main chain, then they will still think it is risky, even if many nodes appear that signal being a UASF.  Again, what matters to them only, is that they can get listed on an exchange as a separate coin.  Whether you run your node in your basement or not doesn't matter.  So the decision to split depends not on that node.  It depends on what they think the market will do, and if they should take the risk to leave the main chain.

Is the full nodes "influencing" some miners to do something they weren't going to do, i.e. to fork, which brings about the situation of the market deciding the outcome them having power or not. And if you say it isn't, why do you not define it as such. Nothing else in your response had anything to do with this question nor has any bearing on an answer to that question.

Full nodes have the power to accept or deny the miners work.
If majority of the Full Node network denies a certain block, that
block is considered invalid and other miners will ignore that invalid
work. It is essentially a "Veto Power". The miner's work is not always
correct (though they try to be, otherwise they lose their reward). When
the block is propagated, it is spread throughout the network to
determine if a "Veto" is needed. Majority of the time, it is not needed.

If miners choose to ignore what the full node network consensus is
saying and choose to continue to build upon the invalid block, thus
creating an invalid chain, that would be an attack (or a mistake
because miners are not checking other miners work, but trusting
them) on the network and the markets could react by selling, since
Bitcoin's Consensus Mechanism has been proven to be faulty.

This is why any large mining pool with a high to majority hash is
an attack/threat to the network, and Satoshi wrote about it in the
whitepaper. If that mining pool comes to fruition, they singularly
could ignore the full node network and violate the rules. That is
why decentralized mining and decentralized verifying nodes are
important. Without those two decentralized aspects, Bitcoin
becomes a lie and transforms into an average ponzi game.

Simply, Full Nodes today keep the Miner Nodes from unilateral
protocol breaking actions that the blockchain would always accept
without them. Full Nodes hold the miners to the rules. Without them,
the rules aren't enforceable and exist by handshakes and honor.

The fact is, if Full Verifying Nodes (that are real) had no power, than
the miners who wish to hardfork to 2MB could do so right now. Yet,
they do not since they are waiting for the Economic verifying nodes
and a large group of regular verifying nodes to support their cause.
Most miners understand the true significance of Full Nodes, but may
be playing it down since they originally didn't understand the full
importance and power until recently. Many of the miners in China
still believe that Miner Nodes, as outlined by Satoshi, are the only
nodes. They are ignoring 8+ years of evolution within our system
and holding to a document that became outdated within 1.5 years.
If there was "zilch" significance, they should hardfork already and
stop the "scaling debate" cyclical bullshit.

It is really difficult to find a block.  It is really, really difficult to find a block.  It is the individual miner that finds the block.  My miner could find a block.  In fact if you check out https://kano.is/, the pool broadcasts who finds the blocks.


Note the S9v2.   That means it is a newer S9.  A person who bought one of the miners found a block and shared it.  S/he could have kept the entire block reward.  People solo mine with older equipment, like S3s and such.  Whenever it is "unknown" it's probably a solo miner.  Good on them!  Most of the time is a larger farm though that has the ability to game.

Meanwhile, the more hashpower = more security = larger market investment = ??? Bitcoin.

It is genius.  Nobody can force their will on others. It takes multiple agents.  


Yup.  That's why I run one, but I don't solo mine because the odds are so small of finding one block.  It would maybe take 6 years. It is the individual miner, computer, that finds the blocks.  Because the odds are so small, people pool their hashpower and work together.  It is genius to have division.  

Yeah.  It sucks when that happens or sometimes two blocks are found within miliseconds of each other and one is orphaned. Both stink because you lose your money and, on occasion, it's been 72 hours without a computer pointing to the same pool as you finding and sharing a block reward, which means you haven't covered electricity costs.

They will compromise. Fees are starting to get really really high. Fees now are giving miners almost $5,000 USD(around 3 BTC of fees) per block! This is insane. Miners are starting to make more money by mining Bitcoin than they were previously when the blocks were at 25 BTC per.

Non-mining full nodes have quite a bit of power if they are operated by exchanges or payment processors. If you can't spend your coins in those contentious blocks they are pretty much useless.

That's an area where I think there should be regulation:

1. Define $BTC for tax reasons
2. Ensure they don't "take the money and run".

I keep very little in custodial accounts due to the risks.  It is usually 3 confirmations and out.

This is the point, and doing so, devs ensure that the code remain clean and efficient.  Also offchain scaling is nessecary for microTx.. and nodes needs to still affordable..

The point is that if these entities install nodes that don't see blocks, then they kill their own business.  Concerning exchanges, what is their business ?  Exchange coins.  If two block chains exist, they have all the interest to list both of them, so that people can exchange one in the other.  Exactly as on ethereum.

Can you imagine an exchange telling its customers "nope, sorry, we can't accept deposits or withdrawals, because we installed a node that refuses the block chain that miners are making" ?  (this in the case where the miners didn't fork, but the "UASF" node is installed: it stops at the first non-segwit block, and comes to an eternal halt).

They are in the same catch-22 as the miners.  If the split took place, they could consider installing such a node.  As long as the split didn't take place, installing the node stalls their business.

And IF the miners did split, do you think an exchange is going to forego the huge benefit of having all bitcoin users spend one of their tokens (every bitcoin user now has TWO coins, one on the segwit chain, and one on the non-segwit chain, like with ETC/ETH) to buy the other one, and take fees on all these transactions ?
So they WILL list the old chain just as well as the new one.

Mind you that the minority chain will make blocks less fast.  So the segwit chain will be more congested than the non-segwit chain (the segwit chain will be in minority - if it were in the majority, there wouldn't be any discussion: it is a soft fork, so it would IMPOSE its majority on the entire chain).  It will be even more of a pain to transact on than the other chain.  Suppose now that users prefer the classical bitcoin chain in the market.   If the price plummets, miners will switch back to the old chain, and the segwit chain will maybe die (due to bitcoin's slow difficulty adjustment).  All segwit chain transactions lost !  If you sold your classical bitcoins, they're gone !  
The risk also exists in the other direction.  If segwit becomes majority, and the classical chain is overtaken, then it will simply be orphaned (due to the soft fork nature).  Everything you did on the classical chain is forgotten.  If you bought classical coins and sold your segwit coins, everything is gone !

So you better think what to do, because you have to buy the chain of which you think it is going to win ; but buying the minority chain is going to be difficult (it will be VERY SLOW) ; however, the majority chain may disappear if the minority (segwit) chain becomes majority.  What are you going to do ?

(I would cash out....)

... for themselves.


Why would they ?  They receive each-others' blocks.  If your node considers that block invalid, it doesn't propagate it. Concerning that block, it is as if your node was offline.  If your node is off line, miners don't stop mining.  If 90% of all non-mining full nodes are switched off in half an hour, miners will continue mining.  A full node that refuses a block on the block chain, is like a node that is switched off.  If it doesn't receive another block (from a miner) that is built on the last block that he accepted, it will stop building its own copy of a block chain, and that's it.   On the network, that node will be "silent" now (apart maybe from block requests of the block he refused).  It is like a node that fell behind.

The only thing miners care about, is that their block is accepted by OTHER MINERS, so that it gets included in the sole chain that is out there.  And as time is money for miners, they don't wait for that block to hop happily through the P2P network, they try to catch it from the source: their peers, directly.


Nope.  What you call "veto power" is the "consensus decision mechanism".  Now, in bitcoin, that consensus decision mechanism is solely decided by PoW.  In other words, the sole entities that have veto power are the miners that decide to build on YOUR block or on ANOTHER block that is valid according to THEIR rules.  If they decide that that block is valid according to their rules, and they decide to build on it, that block is now part of the block chain, and no other miner will put that into question.  If he does, systematically, he has FORKED OFF and decided to make a new chain.  

If many full nodes decide to use OTHER VALIDATION RULES than the rules that the miners use to accept their peers' blocks (which is what we are talking about), then these full nodes will simply receive the same block chain as anyone else, but will stop at the first block that is not in agreement with their local rules.  At that point, that node stops.  Nothing more.  This will not influence the miner's decisions to accept, or not, their peers' blocks: in fact, they are not even AWARE of it.  If your node stops because its hard disk is full, or because it has a rule set that is different and refuses a block, for the miners, there's no difference. You are not part of the system that is part of the consensus decision mechanism.  Bitcoin is designed that way: that mechanism is only working with PoW.  You don't have any.  And they don't need you to transmit blocks.  They get them from one another.  If you stop transmitting, that's stopping nobody.  Which is what your node will do: stop.



You can also say: if a lot of nodes on the network stop, but the miners (who are the defining entities of the network consensus, especially if that consensus is "keeping the old rules as always", because they are the ones who deliver PoW, and hence decide on consensus) continue to make a single chain, nobody is even going to notice, except maybe that a lot of nodes are stopping and falling behind, or disappear from the network.

If what you say is true, then I can kill bitcoin tomorrow.  I make a copy of core software, and change something in the rules, so that it doesn't accept the current block chain.  I now launch 9000 nodes on Amazon with that software.  Hey !  There's a majority of full nodes refusing the block chain !  Consensus mechanism is faulty !

It is exactly because of that easy Sybil attack on "full node majority" that Satoshi introduced Proof of Work for the consensus decision, to deny non-mining nodes (whose numbers can easily be manipulated and whose majority is a matter of launching nodes) any consensus decision rights !



But the very proof of the pudding is the eating: if in this "war", non-mining nodes had anything to say, one would already have seen massive Sybil attacks by armies of nodes pushing one or the other side.  That's not the case.   Running 10 000 nodes is cheaper than mining for a few hours.  The fact that this doesn't happen, is the proof that these full nodes don't mean anything.

If bitcoin was sensible to a large majority of full nodes doing weird things like refusing a block chain, then anyone wanting to bring down bitcoin would have a very easy way to do so.  Launch 100 000 nodes for a few days who refuse what's happening, and bitcoin would be dead.  
No, bitcoin has protected itself from the cabals of non-mining entities with Proof of Work.

This is one thing that makes me feel bitcoin disappointed. We can easily see that we are paying a fee four times higher than before (in USD). However, we have to pay high fees while transactions are not confirmed, it is unreasonable for them to refuse to compromise to solve this problem. If it continues, I think I will use a non-bitcoin coin.

With coinbase taking LTC as an example..using it instead is a no brainer...had 2k tied up for 2 days...and yes I paid the fee on the btc transaction that was approparate....BEFORE it snag'd up the other week over 200,000 backlog......annoying...and now this is an option around using BTC...with 2 out of my last major moves to pay bills monthly (i mine ltc to btc) NOT going thru
promptly.....I feel forced to do this..just move it as LTC instead...(starting to get weird...i mine ltc to btc..i now move ltc to btc...why is it I even use btc now as a store of value? AT this rate of incaction on btc issues...I probably should just hold LTC)

No, that is what you wish to believe.

The economy and community does not follow the miners, they only
follow valid work. If the miners wish to consistently mine in opposition
of the verifying node network, then they will lose everywhere except
amongst themselves. Their recent work becomes worthless and will be
orphaned. The economy and community rejects that recent work.




They only receive each others blocks for expedited mining, not for verification.
The verification is done individually (and sometimes not at all) as well as by the
verifying node network. If all miners say the work is valid, yet the verifying node
network says it is not, the exchanges and community are alerted and stops since
the miners are building a bad chain. It is then possible that the miners caused this
invalidated chain either on purpose as a collective attack or as a mistake.

This exactly happened in the past (was a miner mistake then) and the economies
and community stopped transacting and rolled back their work (orphaned that chain).
The verifying node network saw that they were not validating their work (built bad chain)
and stopped everyone from using that chain. Your attempted argument now ignores
this historical event that proves my viewpoint. Your argument contradicts what did occur
in the past and what the community lived and learned from.




Nope. You have confused and combined two individual systems.
You have combined PoW with verification. They are separate systems and not
contingent upon the other. One involves computational hashing work and the
other involves validation of origins. Your understanding of modern mining is
incorrect.

You ignore that miners can create bad blocks and other miners could choose
to build on those bad blocks, thus creating bad chains. In those events, where
is the "Veto Power"? Where is the "checks & balances"? That is performed by
the Verifying Node network and you're purposefully ignoring that aspect for the
sake of your misunderstood argument.




This comment is irrelevant and in a way actually proves my point. Miners are
blind to the realities of the network and how it functions, and instead are only
concerned with the "rat race" that they conduct between themselves. They have
existed in this ignorant state for so long, they have deluded themselves into thinking
they are the controllers of the chain based upon outdated and incorrect Bitcoin theory.

The reality is that they are just one component in the blockchain system. Verifying
Nodes came about and become more important in time, while these miners ignored
everything other than the nonce. They are effectively five years behind everyone else.

To answer your question, if miners all created bad blocks and the verifying node
network detects this and stop relaying those blocks, the correct answer is the first
miner to notice this Verifying Node Network rejection and begin to rework on the last
valid block, is first to get more bitcoins when the chain needs to flip over. Those miners
who wish to charge forward on the bad chain, requiring everyone else including the
economies to follow them, will quickly discover no one behind them and that token
being worthless. Miners are not loyal to each other, but should only be loyal to the
validated chain. The Verifying Node network maintains the validated chain.

Your argument assume full miner obedience to each other miner, which either means
you believe the majority of miners are in secret collusion (an attack vector) or do not
understand what their power actually is. You cite PoW as if it is the only law, but that
is incorrect. PoW does not actually determine valid work, but is only "busy work".




No, you do not understand what I am saying or you are being intentional disingenuous.

If a miner creates a bad block, and other miners do not reject it but build upon it, the
validating node network will reject it for everyone other than the miners, and we will
all know the miners have gone off course. The community and economies freeze until
the miners are brought back into line. The community, developers, and economies then
all decide ASAP how we will rectify this bad work issue. Majority of the time, I would bet
99.999% of the time, all non-miners will agree to reject all that work and require that
work recommence again at the block prior to the invalid chain block. This is what we have
done in the past, and what will do again. Your argument that verifying nodes reject the
miners block and then do nothing is incorrect. It is an alert system for everyone. If the
miners do not wish to rely on what the verifying node network says, as a secondary
source from themselves, that is at their own discretion. But that does not absolve
themselves from a correction. They do not have free will. We all abide to the protocols.

Do you understand that or not? I can't make it any simpler.




Of course and I have never said otherwise. Your statement is Bitcoin 101.

But you are only referring to PoW Consensus. You ignore Verification Consensus.
Verification Consensus comes from independent decentralized Verification Nodes  
whose only job is to watch the miners PoW and confirm that they are building valid blocks.
When miners left the garages and basements of the world and consolidated within small
areas, verification nodes manifested to compensate and protect the Bitcoin system from
possible miner attacks. As miners consolidate and centralize, Bitcoin's security becomes
weaker. PoW Consensus is one small part of the whole puzzle. It is not the foundation.

Verification nodes and the "Verification Consensus" they perform for the community and
economies prevent the miners from unilateral power. Without them, miners can make bad
blocks and no one has any choice in the matter (this is your argument). Bad blocks and
dishonest miners become good and honest in your backwards malformed reality. Your
argument is either misguided or intentionally disingenuous.




Your argument is irrelevant and I never made such statements prior that would lead
down to this type of discussion. But for the sake of completeness I will comment slightly.

Yes, you are correct that creating 10,000 or even millions of verifying nodes is not enough
to cause "one side of the war to win over the other". That is obvious and not interesting.
I am not aware of anyone who is making those claims in general. It is very clear and no
one disputes that Mining Nodes build blocks based on the rules of PoW. In order to move
between chains, only the Miners (in theory) have the power to do so. But, and what you
are ignoring (possibly purposefully) is that Verifying nodes maintain the valid ledger for
everyone other than the miners. If this independent decentralized ledger alerts the
community and economies that a miner or miners are building invalid blocks, everyone
other than the miners stop, not just the nodes, that is stupid. All users, developers,
exchange owners, and etc are immediately alerted to a possible problem and are
advised to halt until the issue is resolved. That is what Verifying Nodes do.

I couldn't make it any simpler. In the past, when miners made bad blocks, the verifying
nodes alerted us and we told the miners to "pay attention and stop!". Those miners did
stop and reverted back to the valid chain. That only occurred because the Verifying Node
network did its job and told the community and economy the miner's work was bad.

So, if you think they do nothing, then you ignore that they protect the network from
bad miners or sloppy work. If you think that is not important and everyone should
defer to the miners decision without independent verification, then all I can say is
that you are not here for the right reasons. If you consider Verifying nodes as a
hindrance or a nuisance, it is very likely you are an attacker or just uninformed.
For the sake of being somewhat polite, I will believe that you are misinformed.

There is no such thing as community.  There are individual entities that make individual choices, but that are limited to the technical capabilities they have.  There is no notion of "valid work".  There are just external factors, and each entity's own decisions.  The whole of this behaves in a certain way.

Bitcoin was designed to call by definition "valid work" (but it is called "consensus") what emerges as the block chain.  No more, no less.  That's its basic tenet.  If it is on the block chain, by definition, it is valid, and if it is not there, it "doesn't exist".  As such, the only judges of valid work, are those that make a block chain, and for that, a technical necessity was introduced, proof of work.  So not just anyone can pretend to build a block chain, he has to provide cryptographically secured proof of work.

Of course, dissent can happen, and then, several different block chains, with different rules, can be built.  We're talking about forking.   As such, there are two notions of "valid work", namely the two chains.

What you can do, as an outsider to that writing of block chains, is download and read the data.  That's it.


"orphaned" means, that miners are building ANOTHER chain.  Again, you are making a logical mistake.  No non-miner can orphan anything.  Orphaning means: a block that is a small fork, but has no other blocks built onto it, while his parent (or his parent's parent, or ....) has ANOTHER successor (built by a miner of course) on which a continuing chain is being built.  These notions have NO MEANING outside of what miners do.

As a non-mining node, you cannot "orphan" a block, because you cannot BUILD a competing chain !


But again, if all miners say the work is valid, they don't orphan it, and *it is the only chain that is available* to users.

So, in as much exchanges and users are aware of this, they have only two options:
A) accept the sole chain that is out there
B) not accept it and STOP.

Now, as I outlined already several times, choices are made INDIVIDUALLY, and so each entity by itself can chose to continue using bitcoin the way it is (the existing chain, which, by definition of consensus, is "the valid one"), or simply STOP, but then they cannot transact any more, cannot receive anything any more.  Do you really think that individually, each user will decide to forego his ability to transact, while his competitors can still do so ?


Ah.  You mean that all miners had been mining for a while a "wrong" chain, and then, because users stopped transacting, they decided to wind back the chain collectively, under pressure of the non-mining nodes ?  That never happened.
You are talking about the bug  of 8/8/2010 - I suppose that's a joke ; or you are talking about the rollback of 11/3/2013, when there was a genuine hard fork in bitcoin due to two incompatible versions ?   What happened then was that miners forked accidentally.  And those on the buggy fork graciously stopped their fork.  They could have continued too, but at that date, nobody knew what such things would do.

Note that this didn't have anything to do, AGAIN, with non-mining nodes.  MINING nodes were making two different block chains by error, because there was a bug in version 0.8 that allowed big blocks (huhuhu), and other miners, still running version 0.7 didn't accept that, and made another fork.  

This is absolutely not what one is talking about here.  This was considered, back then, as a bug, not a matter of choice or power.
And at that time, the mining industry wasn't yet entirely separate from the customers/users, and Core was still the accepted sole centralized authority that decided about everything.


What you don't seem to understand, is that if you have no power to build a new block on top of an old one, which is the sole WAY to validate the old block, your validation is without any power.  PoW means that there's only one way to validate a history, to turn it into a consensus: building on what you want to validate.  As such, the only ones that have power to validate, are mining pools.

Yes, you can VERIFY FOR YOURSELF.  But that's only *informational*.  You can see "hey, the consensus, validated by PoW, wasn't following the rules I have in my software here".  So now you know. But that's it.  Your "validation" has no value in the consensus mechanism, because you didn't build on top of it with PoW.

"valid chain" is the chain that is being build.  If a chain forks, there are two alternative "valid chains".  But the only ones deciding about what's valid or not, are those that validate an old block, by putting a new block on top of it.  


Then, BY DEFINITION of PoW consensus, this is the good chain.  The good chain, is by definition, what is built with PoW on top of one another.  The definition of good block is the one on top of which miners build.  

There can be forks, and then there are two alternative "good chains", with different notions of "good".



Nope.  As you can technically see, there is no veto power to be had, because by definition, the chain being build is the good one.  But your full node can INFORM you that what is now out there as "good chain" is not being built according to the rules that were put in your software.  That's all.  You can take your economic decisions based upon that, but even if you don't like it, and you want to sell your coins, you will have to accept the new chain, at least for the time of you transacting and selling your coins.  Because if you don't accept that chain, you cannot do ANYTHING.


This is simply because in bitcoin, they *define* what is the valid chain.  They don't have to take into account anything else.  By definition of "consensus by PoW", the chain on which miners build, is the valid chain, and the rules by which they build it, is the de facto protocol.   You can use that chain, or you can refuse to use it, and if you refuse to use it, you locked yourself out from any transaction possibility.

It is quite amazing that people don't seem to understand the fundamental consensus mechanism by proof of work.  There is no such thing as "verification consensus".  The only consensus that exists, is the one that is given by proof of work.  According to bitcoin's fundamental design.  And the "valid protocol by consensus" is WHATEVER is the rule set that comes out of this consensus mechanism.

So if that consensus mechanism, today, says that bitcoin is the stuff made with blocks of 1 MB, then today, that's part of bitcoin's consensus.  If tomorrow, we DISCOVER that the only block chain out there has 10 MB blocks, then we can *observe* that the consensus protocol is visibly the one that has 10 MB blocks.  If in a few years, we *discover* that the only chain out there has block rewards of 500 BTC per block, then we can *observe* that the consensus protocol of bitcoin is one in which each block has a block reward of 500 BTC.   Consensus protocol is an emerging property, and is defined by whatever are the rules according to which the sole active chain out there is discovered/observed to be made.  However, individual antagony between miners and their resulting catch-22 for changing anything is such, that most probably, this consensus protocol is largely believed to be immutable.  But that is a property that is still to be seen, although, up to now, it seems to hold water.  Only a centralized force can modify that, if it can influence more than 51% of the hash rate.  In the past, Core was the central authority of bitcoin, and could hence impose the rule changes simply because all miners downloaded their software and blindly used it.  So in the past, the consensus protocol could change by Core's desires. 

But on top of that, we are in fact discussing a totally different situation.  Miners, for the moment, are not deviating from what is bitcoins' protocol.  In fact, what some desperately try to do, is to FORCE miners to deviate from the protocol they have been using until now.  This is even more impossible for non-mining nodes.  If miners keep on happily making the chain like they are used to, and suddenly, some nodes decide to CHANGE THEIR SOFTWARE, and find out that the new software has new rules that don't comply with how the miners have been making the whole chain all this time, then this *really* doesn't matter for those miners.  Note that in the few "rollbacks" we've seen, it was the NEW software that miners installed, that forked off, and one REVERTED to the old protocol, graceously (simply because nobody WANTED to make a fork).  If you install new, incompatible software with what is going on, and your new software is not going to agree with what is being produced, then that's really absolutely of no significance.

In a way, we are discussing how non-mining nodes could impose deviations from the protocol by their sheer majority.  You could see this as a way of attacking bitcoin: if ever a sheer majority of non-mining nodes can impose any modification of the protocol rules, and hence, make miners deviate from what was the set of rules by which the block chain was to be made, this would be an easy way of attacking bitcoin !

In fact, you could almost say that if ever this worked, if ever, putting a new protocol on full nodes, and by majority of full nodes, you force that new protocol upon miners, then bitcoin is in great danger.  Because I can just write any new protocol code, launch it on 10 000 nodes, and that would mean that miners have to comply to what I now launch as a new protocol ?  Even if it means, for instance, that every new block now contains a coinbase transaction to my address with 200 new coins ?  If I modify Core software to do that, and then I launch this on 10 000 nodes, miners are obliged to follow my protocol ?

My whole argument is, that no, they won't stop. Because they need to transact. You would probably be right with a technical incident, like happened in the past.  Something that those causing it weren't even aware of, and say "oops, sorry for the inconvenience".  Yes.  But this is not what we are talking about this time.  We are talking about economic and political choices.  We are talking about miners that continue to make a valid chain according to the old rules, with the old software, ON PURPOSE.
And we are talking about users that want/need to transact.  So what you are imagining, is that users are going to download, themselves, new software of which they KNOW that it will not agree with what miners are producing, to stop their own ability to transact, and think that:
1) they will do so and put themselves out of the system that way
2) this will affect the miners in any way

is totally misguided.  

I would even say, even though it is bolder: if miners purposely decide themselves to modify their protocol (which is a difficult thing to do for them, and they can only consider that if they have a large majority, because they take the initiative to fork away), and ALL of them do so, then users and exchanges still have to follow, because if they don't, they exclude themselves.    

Technically, bitcoin is made such that as long as there is only one block chain out there, there's no choice but to use it or to leave it.  If you leave it, you don't have access to your coins, you cannot transact, you cannot receive transactions.  It is as if you left bitcoin.  If you accept it, you accept the consensus protocol by which it is being built.

But in all of this, the essentially difficult and impossible step, is for those "stepping out".  For miners, stepping out means MODIFYING the protocol they are used to.  For full nodes, stepping out means: installing software that is not compatible with the actually made chain.

For miners, this implies that they fork away.
For nodes, it means that they stop.

This is the strong force of immutability.  For every actor, it is individually a crazy thing to do to deviate from the actual consensus protocol.   For miners, it means that they might start wasting all their hash rate.  For nodes, it means that they exclude themselves, and cannot transact any more.

No. I disagree with your answer and again you ignore what I am saying.

Valid work is not Consensus, you are confused. Consensus is the combination
of PoW (Work) & Verification (Valid). If Miners only do PoW, and ignore Validation,
it falls to the Verifying Nodes to check Validation. If you don't understand that,
you likely don't want to. I'm talking very plain here.




You are ignoring my argument and nitpicking certain terms.
You are stating the obvious. Are you really this oblivious to what I am saying?

The violating chain will be orphaned by the violating miners themselves, when
the verifying nodes alert the network of an issue. The miners will then find themselves
alone and will either correct themselves or the community will contact them and tell
them to correct. This scenario assumes the miners are not attacking, but is only a mistake.




Again, you ignore what has actually occurred in the past.
The exchanges stop accepting and withdrawing transaction. They freeze.
Then wallet developers and Bitcoin developers sent out alerts throughout the
Bitcoin Social Media Sites and advise all Bitcoiners to not sent transaction until
the issue is resolved.

If miners perform a mistake or an attack, we will do this again.




Oh graciously? That's an interesting word in light that your argument is that "miners always
build valid blocks on the only valid chain that they singularly determine to be valid". Lol.
Miners are blind busy-workers only intended to reconcile differences, yet many times they
aren't paying attention.

The miners in both events, didn't even know what was occurring in real time. They were not
monitoring the network. They were blinded as that there were two forks. The only reason why
miners were alerted was because non-mining nodes were detected to the issues and then
non-miners determined which chain to orphan. The miners then complied with that advice.
Gracious is pretty brown-nosing.



You clearly do not understand what I have been trying to explain.
You are too busying trying to prove that verifying nodes do nothing at all.

If you are correct, then the miners should have hardforked for larger blocks long ago.
Everyday they do not perform a hardfork, is a day that my argument is correct and
yours is based on wishful thinking.




No. PoW does not always need to be valid work. There are no mechanisms that
exist within the PoW Consensus mechanism that determines if the work is valid.
Validity only comes from verification of the contents of that work. Fake work
could be performed upon fake blocks and repeated. Validation only exists when
a miner or a verifying node intentionally check and verify the contents.




LOL! Well there you have it. Your understanding is fucked.
I will make it very simple.

Scenario 1 - Valid Work
Miner PoW + Miner Validation + Protocol Compliance = Good Chain (Level 1 - Miner)
Verifying Node Validation + Protocol Compliance = Good Miner Chain (Level 2 - Everyone Else)

Scenario 2 - Non-Validated Work aka Invalid Work
Miner PoW - Miner Validation + Protocol Compliance = Unknown Chain (Level 1 - Miner)
Verifying Node Validation + Protocol Compliance = Good or Bad Miner Chain (Level 2 - Everyone Else)

Scenario 3 - Protocol Violating Work aka Invalid Work
Miner PoW + Miner Validation - Protocol Compliance = Unknown Chain (Level 1 - Miner)
Verifying Node Validation + Protocol Compliance = Good or Bad Miner Chain (Level 2 - Everyone Else)

Scenario 4 - Non-Validated & Protocol Violating Work aka Invalid Work
Miner PoW - Miner Validation - Protocol Compliance = Unknown Chain (Level 1 - Miner)
Verifying Node Validation + Protocol Compliance = Good or Bad Miner Chain (Level 2 - Everyone Else)

Scenario 5 - Bad PoW & Non-Validated & Protocol Violating Work aka Invalid Work
Miner PoW - Miner Validation - Protocol Compliance = Bad Chain (Level 1 - Miner)
Verifying Node Validation + Protocol Compliance =  Bad Miner Chain (Level 2 - Everyone Else)

If Bad PoW is performed in any different version of a block scenario combination,
it is always rejected as a bad block. Verifying Node do not need to check that work
since it is always wrong. There is no need to validate bad PoW.

My arguments apply to Scenarios 2 through 5. That is what I am talking about.
When I have talked about "Vetos" I am referring to Level 2 of each scenario.
When a Level 2 event occurs, Verifying nodes could rejects the miners invalid work.

It seems your argument is that scenarios 1 through 5 are always valid chains
because the miner says so. That is very laughable and I wish we could test your
belief in the real world, but unfortunately for me, not all miners are that dense.




Nope. You talk nonsense. As you can see above in my Scenario example, there
are times where valid work is not valid. You are redefining terms to fit within
your word games. Valid work is always independently verified. Block on top of
block does not guarantee verification. Only by checking the PoW and the block
contents is the work valid.

Under your misguided definition, if all miners stop verifying data or violate the
protocol, and they build blocks that are all lies, you would still consider that
good and valid work. If that is what you are really saying and believe, I'm
disappointed that I bothered to explain my view point to you, since you are
unsalvageable or just malicious.




Lol. No, your statement and understanding is an oversimplification of what is
actually occurring. PoW is one part. What you are arguing is only part of the story.




This is irrelevant to our discussion.
Changing the protocol in the future and whether immutability actually exists  
within a blockchain system are entirely separate topics.




This is irrelevant to our discussion.
I have no interest in Verifying Nodes that change the rules in an attempt to
compel the miners to those new rules. Your are changing the topic. In this
recent argument, it is no wonder why you are arguing against my Verifying
Node view point. The real reason you are disagreeing with me, is that you
don't like the logic that it leads to into the UASF proposal. Whether my logic
flows into the UASF proposal is irrelevant and I am only discussing what
Verifying Nodes have been doing since 2010.

So the reality is that your fear of UASF has blinded you to my point unrelated
to UASF.



This is irrelevant to our discussion. I never made statements to the contrary of
what you are now expounding upon. You are talking to yourself here.

You ignore my statements in order to make a speech about some of the flaws in
UASF proposal. You are telling me what I already know and have never argued for.
I am talking about non-mining validating nodes and whether they have value to the
network or not. Your argument has been that they provide no service and that miners
should be worshiped as trusted noble parties.

My argument is miners serve the network, the network does not serve them.
If a point comes where the network serves them, the network is worthless and
the miners will be the last to know, as usual.

i dont see why core can't compromise to 2mb + segwit and some road map to allow bigger blocks.

You need increasing on chain transaction to incentivize miners via fees, and also some capacity in LN tranasactions.

It is suspicious that core seems to not agree to this. Particually as LTC seems to have agreed to it

This sucks so far for bitcoin. Otherwise bitcoin will be a lot stronger. The tech is there, I don't understand why people won't compromise to make bitcoin better.

No, we aren't talking about that. That is what you keep talking about.
I am talking about invalid work created intentionally or by accident.




Please cite in any of my prior statements where users or verfying node
operators are downloading ad implementing protocol violating rules. I
have never said anything along those line. I am talking about the current
protocol, not any possible future protocols or etc.




What you are describing without overwhelming community consensus is
an attack on the network. It would be an act of war that has not occurred
within Bitcoin ecosystem yet. What you are advocating is the annihilation
of the trustless network and the creation of a trusted corporate platform.

The users will not follow the miners without very high support. Otherwise
it is an attack on the network and those miners will create more enemies
than allies.

You wish to open pandora's box, then do it. Stop bullshitting and do it
already. Stop putting your toes in the water and lets get this party started.
Miner's have not done so yet, because the network and the users have not
agreed to it yet. If the miners don't need permission, do it already.

Miners are just bluffing and everyone knows, that is why no one cares and
disregards them now. They have overplayed their hand.




That is your belief. You ignore that the system is cyclical. Each part of the
system feeds the fuel for the next part. When you say "the v-nodes stop
and can't transact" you are ignoring where the miners coins ultimately go
after 200 more confirmations. You ignore that the whole system will
eventually stop. You think the party goes on forever.

You are ignoring the full symbiotic Bitcoin organism just to argue that
Verifying Node have no value and that only Miner nodes matter. Overall
it is a shortsighted argument.

Still waiting for an answer to these two questions.

This is the very idea of a UASF.


There is no notion of "attack on the network", "valid", "good", "bad", "correct" or not, by definition, in a decentralized consensus system.  Things just happen.  Of course, certain happenings have the name of an attack, because the system was initially said to have a given purpose, and any different behaviour from that stated purpose can carry the name of "attack", but it is just one of the behaviours and properties of the system.

For instance, the famous "51% attack" is a potential consensus behaviour.   If tomorrow, we *observe* that pieces of chain of, say, 50 blocks, are orphaned, then we could consider that to be a manifestation of one of the behavioural properties of the bitcoin system which carries the name of "51% attack".  But nevertheless, the consensus protocol and the consensus chain would be the new one.  It is called an "attack" because it would make the system not function as its initially intended way of functioning, but hey, it is part of its dynamics.  It would imply also that certain "confirmed" transactions have now disappeared from the consensus (they were older than 6 blocks, and younger than 50 blocks when the forking happened).  If that was the "intention" of the "attacker", then his attack succeeded.  But one cannot fathom "intentions".   It is just part of the possible behaviours of that system, and "attacks" are part of that.  An attack that got accepted by a majority of miners, is then by definition, part of the consensus.

A decentralized system, by definition, has no defined purpose, and hence no "good" and "bad".  No "valid" or "invalid".  If it were, it would mean that there's a central authority DEFINING "valid" and "invalid", and it wouldn't be a decentralized system without authorities.  As such, one has to accept in a decentralized system, that whatever happens, is what is "supposed to happen" and part of its behavioural definition. 
It is a bit like a natural system: there is no "valid" and "invalid" way of behaving under gravity.  We can only *discover* how gravity works, but we cannot determine that a certain planet had an "invalid" behaviour.   If it behaves that way, that IS the valid behaviour, and if ever our theories of gravity (our "validating nodes") say that this motion is not what it should be, then our theories are wrong, and not nature.

Of course, from the moment that there IS a central authority, everything changes: that central authority can impose its rules, and if those rules are violated, have enough power to take corrective action (put in prison, confiscate belongings, manipulate communication.... but it needs POWER over the other actors in one or another way).  Only a central authority can define "valid" and "invalid".  Hence, the notions itself of valid and invalid only make sense in a centralized system.


On the contrary.  I'm saying that bitcoin IS a corporate platform right now, if ever "miners can find an agreement" by "negociating in a room".



That is your belief. You ignore that the system is cyclical. Each part of the
system feeds the fuel for the next part. When you say "the v-nodes stop
and can't transact" you are ignoring where the miners coins ultimately go
after 200 more confirmations. You ignore that the whole system will
eventually stop. You think the party goes on forever.
[/quote]

This is again because you think in corporate terms.  There are not "two camps with two leaders".  There are not "two armies facing one another, with each their general".

Each mining pool is an individual entity, and each user (whether Joe or whether Coinbase) is an individual entity, that is not in a hierarchical relationship, or in any other form of collusion, with any other entity.  That is the hypothesis of decentralization: no collusion, no agreements, between individual entities.  From the moment there are agreements on collective action, the system is by definition, centralized under the authority of the one organizing the collective action.  So we presume that mining pools don't sit together in a room, and we presume that users (even big ones) don't sit together in a room.  If they do, we have a corporate organisation.

Now, at any given moment in time, each of these entities has to make an INDIVIDUAL choice, between "adhering to what is running", or "deviating from what is running".  For a miner, that means, forking.  As long as a miner is mining according to the emergent protocol of the past, and is making blocks that most probably will be accepted by his peers, he's not deviating.  From the moment he starts rejecting blocks that his peers make, or start producing blocks that will be rejected by his peers, he forks away, and tries to build an alternative chain.

If a miner takes that decision individually, he's most probably going to make, as a first one, a risky move.  He can bet on the fact that other miners will see this and take the decision to follow him, or not, but making a bitcoin fork on your own, is risky: you may waste all your hash rate doing so.  In a decentralized system, miner pools need to take these decisions individually.  If they sit together in a room, the system is a corporate centralized entity.

If an individual user installs non-mining node software at a moment "t" in time that is not compatible with the unique chain that is being made at that very moment, most probably, at that very moment, this new software will simply not sync.  If that individual user needs his node to connect his wallet to, he will not have a functioning wallet, and will not be able to transact.  If he needs these transactions for his business, he kills his business.

As such, for each individual entity, the act of "deviating" is most probably a losing one.  It for sure is a losing one for the node owner.  It CAN be a risky but profitable bet for the miner, forking away.   It is true that *users* telling a miner that if he forks away, and he can keep his chain alive (which is difficult with bitcoin, given the slow difficulty adaptation) he may win in the market, might motivate him to jump and take the risk, if he thinks that the fork will be more beneficial to him, than the original protocol.   However, the nodes not being directly proportional to the user power in the market, counting node votes is a very bad market study.  Probably the market behaviour is not going to change because some nodes signal something.  So whether there are signalling nodes or not, doesn't change much, in fact, for the miner's decision.  But again, the *decision* is entirely in the hands of miners.  All the rest is just "propaganda".


I'm not saying that only miner nodes matter.  I'm saying that only miner nodes define what is valid, what is the consensus protocol, what is the consensus history etc....   But they don't determine market value.  That's left to the users. And of course miners are sensitive to the market value.

I'm just saying that in this symbiosis, as you call it, there's no *power* role for non-mining nodes.  There's utility, but that utility is mainly for its owner, and it is also a free proxy service for mining pools.   But they don't master any lever arm in the power game in that "symbiosis", which I rather see as half symbiosis, half predator-prey.

Core devs are hard core players don't play like pussies. They don't have much BTC they don't need easy PnD it on market and take all solutions that may pump prices up.
We need to be critical and we will go to moon if we find way to go around problems.

I agree nor do they use it.  They're all theory.

Again, I ask you cite where I stated anything that would need new rules
or new nodes. Everything I stated is occurring as we speak and has occurred
since 2010. I'm talking about verifying nodes, not UASF.

I know you are paranoid of UASF, but I'm not talking about that.




Well I disagree with your interpretation of things.
Satsohi clearly thought those things were attacks.
Security experts would consider those things attacks.

Your argument is comparable to "when hackers or malware enter into nuclear
power plants in order to implement code actions that will cause that facility
to go into an uncontrolled systematic meltdown, which will affect tens of
thousands of people somewhat immediately, and tens of millions to
hundredths of millions for multiple generations with diseases and
environmental effects, you are saying that isn't an attack on that nuclear
facility, humans, or the environment, but is only the "behavioral definition
of that nuclear system." With such a viewpoint of things, even murder of
another human being is the behavioral definition of humans, so according to
your argument, murder is natural and not an attack on that other individual
and their rights. From this point forward, no one should take any of your
arguments seriously or legitimately contemplate it's soundness.

This argument type, in order to circumvent my argument, should be reexamined
since it leads down a road that is not healthy for Bitcoin, nor for life in general.
This thinking is neither creative nor genius, it is blatantly malicious to life and
intelligent advancements. It is no wonder you would take the position that PoW
is the only "power" system within Bitcoin, your thinking is already twisted.




No, you are very incorrect in multiple areas.

Valid and Invalid is defined by the rules that which we all currently abide by
in Bitcoin. Saying that valid or invalid work is only based upon the whims of
what decision a miner builds on another miner's block, is very simplistic at
the least.

There is a central authority that defines information and that is the blockchain
itself. The "blockchain" is centralized, yet is secured by decentralized
independent verifying nodes throughout the world. The "blockchain" system
that Satoshi created is not a simple ledger, that is your misunderstanding.
Your argument ignores realities that we live within, while attempting to argue
something that has never been proven true.

The whitepaper does not explain the complexities of the blockchain system
itself, and thus since you rely on that paper and statements from people who
do not understand anything beyond that 9 year old paper, you are ignorant of
the realities. The "blockchain" enforces the rules and is a centralized structure.
The "blockchain" was designed to monitor the miners, not just the token, that
was secondary when created. The public ledger provides proof for everyone,
other than the miners, in order to verify the miners' block work and that it is
valid and in compliance with the current protocol. The public ledger was not for
tokens alone, that is a secondary effect which helps facilitate proof between two
individuals transacting. So the ledger is for miner proofs and token proofs.
You do not understand the interconnect aspects of Bitcoin since Satoshi did
not publicly advise you of such in plain writing for you to blindly follow.

Your argument that there is no valid or invalid behavior in Bitcoin, contradicts
what Satoshi attempted to create. Satoshi tried to create symbiotic system of
compliance from untrusted parties through public proofs. If Satoshi envisioned
the Miner's to have 100% control to determine validity, there is no need for
public proofs. The system could have been designed to be private without blocks.
The purpose for a public blockchain contradicts your whole argument in many ways.

In addition, your example of gravity does not apply to this argument, you must use
a system with rules that has valid or invalid properties and then show me why there
is no actual difference between the two properties. You are trying to argue that in
Bitcoin, and possibly all simple and complex systems that exist in this universe,
there are no truths or falsehoods (though an argument can be made in other
discussion types, when it applies to physical reality that humans accept as being
concrete/"real", we can not argue this type of argument, especially in sciences
and likewise in Bitcoin). So, this example is worthless and a distraction.

This argument type, as applied to Bitcoin which clearly has enforcement
mechanisms and protocols that are directly programmed into the system,
invalidates your form of thinking and argument type entirely and outright. It is
one thing to be philosophical in Bitcoin in order to explain failures or successes or
how systems work within the Bitcoin system or are comparable, it is another to
make an argument that existence is illusionary, murder and birth are equivalent,
and valid and invalid bitcoin blocks are neither in compliance nor in violation.
This is not the reality that the community currently exists in. Satoshi specifically
created rules and regulations within our system before he formed the Genesis block.

The only reason why you are arguing this is so that Miners can determine all
actions 100% of the time, in 100% of all possible scenarios. What you failed to
realize is that in majority of those scenarios, there is no value in that new Bitcoin
system or it's token. When the miners take an action, as theorized by your argument,
in theory they will neutralize and void the novel properties that the system created
and thus void the monetary properties of the Bitcoin token. You only wish to be right
in your argument and have not applied this to real world possibilities and final
outcome probabilities. Your argument is that the consumer is a blind moron and
these miners will sell a lie since there are no truths anyway. Your argument is to
convert Bitcoin from a novel interesting system that's byproduct is a digital truth,
and transform it into a purposeful ponzi where the properties are illusions and scams.




First, that is only based on a current viewing of transitory events.
Second, there are times where miners getting together to discuss issues is
appropriate, as long as it is made public and a true record is made public. All separate
groups within the Bitcoin Community should have separate and together meetings
and discussions to determine certain aspects of the Bitcoin system. Consensus does
not come about in a vacuum, but through time and discussions. When the best possible
choice has the most backing from all groups (devs,miners, exchanges, economies,
users, etc) then an action is taken and within Consensus. So not all meetings are bad.

Back on topic, for Bitcoin to become a "trusted corporate platform" it must have a small
amount of miners all licensed and regulated by their respective governments. Your
belief either means that large miners are currently secret governmental operations,
will outmaneuver government regulation forever (not likely as blocksize increases in
short intervals of time), or are just dumb or suicidal.




I agree with everything other than your immutability term.

Immutability has nothing to do with what you stated otherwise.
Immutability only exists as long as there is no purposefully undoing past work to
erase or prevent a valid on-chain action.




I do not think in corporate terms, you ignore my overall argument to now talk about
mining pools and corporate terms. Those were not my arguments so you either
don't understand me or are intentionally changing the subject. Your statement above
doesn't even address my statement in anyway. I am talking about how Bitcoin is a
symbiotic organism that each sub system feeds into the next, allowing it to survive.
You are talking about only mining and ignoring all other sub systems.

Mining pools being "decentralized mining" is deceptive since it is only the final block
signal that is important. I could have 80% of the hash within a mining pool and the
20% are thousands of individuals. In theory, my 80% hash will allow me to have
majority signaling within that pool, thus that pool is not a true pool, but is effectively
my single mining facility. So in that sense, Mining Pools are equivalent to single miners
since they have possibility of being exploited.

Anyway, my paragraph that you quoted was making the point that after 200 blocks,
the miners past block reward is allowed to be moved (by the terms of the current
protocol). If a miner hardforks without verifying nodes following, that block reward
after 200 blocks, is lost to that miner since it does not exist to anyone other than
the miner(s). The miner needs the exchanges and users to follow the chain they
are building upon. But, what my argument is and that you continue to never address
is that there is no mechanism that forces exchanges or users to follow this new chain.

So, the fact that this is our reality, means that the miners do not control the chain
or the future of Bitcoin, but only have the power through PoW to determine block
inclusions and block building. The true power and control comes from the users
who are using or speculating the value, which is purchased or paid by P2P (as
Satoshi envisioned and designed) or exchanges. Thus, the miners are only an
economically enforced competitive mechanism within the full Bitcoin organism,
that is subject to the wills of the non-miners and are used by the non-miners as
a proxy to cause chain determinations. That is my point and argument. Yet you
do not ever address why I am wrong, instead you say that valid and invalid blocks
are illusions and purposefully ignore the rules of the system.

Instead of agreeing with my reasoning or disagreeing based on a misunderstanding
of mine or incorrect procedure of the Bitcoin system, you argue that miners can and
will change the rules, which doesn't prove true legitimate power but shows that if
miners can't influence or coerce, they will just change the rules of the game on
their own, in mid-game like children who lose in children's games. Satoshi never
intended that and would consider that an obvious attack to all non-miners.




I agree with everything except your term of "emergent protocol of the past".

I do not understand what that means since the protocol is not emergent in
Bitcoin currently. There may be aspects of the system that are "emergent"
but the protocol was not intended to be. Satoshi's protocol was intended to
freeze and not be adjusted, unless there are bugs/emergencies. The protocol
can not be emergent since that is an obvious attack vector through time, only
subsystems of Bitcoin can be emergent. The base protocol itself was not intended
to evolve, that is a modern day misconception that only came about around
sometime in 2015 to 2016. We can add features, scripts, subsystems, and etc,
but "evolving protocol through time" is extremely concerning. The value of the
system and token no longer becomes a known entity that is dependable and
trusted, but becomes nebulous and fully at the will of attackers and the ignorant.
Who would trust a digital asset/currency, that at any time, pushed by any party,
could change the systems rules through this emergent mechanism? You are arguing
for the exact mechanism that the financial world uses and that which Satoshi was
upset about. It is an exploit, not an advantage. Your Emergent Protocol Mechanism
will be used to erode and ultimately destroy Bitcoin.




In our current system, Mining pools being considered decentralized is an
assumption. You have chosen to trust untrustable parties. You must assume
all miners are already compromised and colluding. It would be very passive and
naive to think otherwise in the system we participate. It does not matter whether
they are business corporations or not, that is irrelevant.




Yes and No.
The issue that you are talking about now, is whether "Miners follow the blockchain"
or the "blockchain follows the Miners". Though I do not care about UASF and have
not been discussing it, the USAF theory is partially based on what I am referring to.

So, we have two choices:

1) Your Argument.
(a) Miners have full authority to do what they please in all scenarios.
(b) The "Consensus" only exists between the miners.
(c) The "blockchain" only exists to facilitate their consensus.
(d) The "markets" only exist to facilitate that consensus.
(e) The "users" only exist to facilitate that consensus.

Results of 1:
Bitcoin as a currency/commodity only exists as the Miner's delusion.
Value of the system and token is comparable to current financial systems.
Experiment is a failure since the Miner's dominated over the system.
The token is an illusion and all aspects serve no purpose.



2) My Argument.
(a)The Verifying Nodes reinforce that Miners comply with current rules.
(b) The "Consensus" exists between Miners and Economic/Verifying Nodes.
(c) The "blockchain" only exists to facilitate their collective consensus.
(d) The "markets" already are included in Section (b).
(e) The "users" are already included in section (b) or (d).

Results of 2:
Bitcoin as a currency/commodity exists as a trustless consensus from diff parts.
Value of the system and token is compared to a digital truth.
Experiment continues since the Miners only move with all non-miner nodes.
The token is quazi-concrete and all aspects are reinforced and secured.



My point, though the Miners are the only subsystem that has the power to build,
pick, or move between the chains (which no one ever, anywhere, has ever
disputed), that does not mean their unilateral action and consensus between
themselves is always correct or creates a valuable future. Due to that being
plainly obvious, the conclusion is that their decision of a future action is based
upon non-miners participation in consensus before action. The non-action is
reinforced by verifying nodes "not following the non-compliant chain". The
Miner's gamble with a certain "non-compliant proposal" would only be deemed
correct by market forces which are manipulable and disconnected from the
community, who are legitimately using the Bitcoin token. The miners are placing
their future in the hands of deceptions (which makes sense from your arguments
point of view since you think all things are illusions anyway).

There should always be one chain, one token, otherwise the market will slowly
destroy the whole system. The human markets are not a true decider, it is a whore
who consumes over time. The effects of it's destruction is not known till may years
into the future. Bitcoin was not designed to have it's future determined by the
human markets. Market determination is the opposite of Consensus. Only the
token is speculative, not the protocol, not consensus, not miners, not verifying
nodes. In opposition, you have argued that all matters of the system, including
the protocol, is speculative and up for debate within the human markets. That is
not Bitcoin as Satoshi designed, that is an attack vector. You wish Bitcoin's Protocol
to be controlled by an insatiable manipulative whore.

Your faith in the human markets is a way to defer your responsibility to others, so
that when Bitcoin collapses and is destroyed by your actions and arguments for
Emergent Protocols, you can wash your hands and say, "I was not wrong, the
markets only revealed the truth to us.". So, you want the great whore to tell
you what is truth. I ask you what was the truth that Satoshi understood and
millions of people learned in 2008-2009? You are in opposition of that truth.




No, the only difference between a verifying node and a mining node is that
miner nodes create blocks using PoW algo. Creating blocks does not
guarantee valid or invalid. That is a lie that is easily determinable because
PoW DOES NOT MANDATE VALIDITY, they are separate parts. Miners have 3
parts and Verifying Nodes have 2 parts. The difference is only block building
(thus some call them non-mining nodes, since they do all else).

Miners choose the chain in the event of a fork, but that does not mean that fork
is valid or invalid, that is semantics. Validity is determined by whether the rules
are enforced and verification of signatures occurred within the last block, not
future blocks. That is not security based but maladjusted argument based.
Validity is a proof, it has either occurred or not. When you argue validity is not
a proof, it is quite shocking and evident that your argument is nonsense.

Once again, I disagree with your interpretation of current events and how the
current system functions. I would also like to point out that you never directly
addressed my statements and advise why my beliefs are incorrect. Instead, you
continue to repeat the same thing over and over, which has been disproved by
history and current events.

Yesterday, I read a document produced by Barry Silbert and certain institutions
within the Bitcoin Community (I disagree with the terms of that agreement,
especially since the terms are nebulous and empty. An agreement is intended
to define things, not obfuscate issues more. This agreement will likely create
more damage to a real agreement or consensus than bring about any resolution.).
The fact that any miner participated and agreed with that document, and join with
those other signing entities, proves my overall argument. Every non-miner who
signed that document is effectively a non-mining node. That document is a present
day representation of why my viewpoint and argument is correct (though I disagree
with the agreement itself).

Until a miner or miners hardfork the chain without high consensus and the
community and users follow along like lost children, you will always be wrong with
your understanding as to the miner's power. That power, as intended by Saotshi
in 2007, failed and eroded within a short time after the client was released and tested.
If you wish to ignore that reality since you depend on the whitepaper being 100%
correct, since it is the only foundation of your understanding of these issues, then so
be it. But that doesn't mean you are correct, that only means you are ignorant of
things that you are not specifically told about by Satoshi.

Satoshi understood in 2010 that what we call "Nakamoto Consensus" today,
failed almost immediately. He implemented the 1MB Cap to prevent the foreseeable
failures from Miner centralization too soon and then left. Ultimately today, Miners
and Verifying & Economic Node together form our "Consensus" in order to determine
the future path. If Miners claim sole power, as per the terms of the "Whitepaper", they
will discover what Satoshi knew in 2010 and what you deny. The truth is that PoW,
though very important for the Bitcoin/blockchain system, does not actually affect the
networks consensus in any advanced way. The PoW Consensus (Miners) has been
relegated to turning a wheel in a car, driven by the Verifying & Economic Nodes.
Basically, in the most simple terms, when ASICs came about and mining became
centralized, Satoshi's original experiment failed (Whitepaper). He patched as best
he could and began our current experiment. This experiment version (Verifying Nodes
are maintained in a decentralized, independent, and non-regulatable way in order
to offset the failures and anticipated future failures from Experiment 1) evolved
naturally from the 1MB Cap being implemented.

What the average (and some advanced) Bitcoiner fails to realize is that Bitcoin only
exists today and functions at all, because he implemented the 1MB Cap to off set his
fatal error. They do not see the truth, because Satoshi did not recite it to them from
the mountain top. The truth is, there is no such thing as "honest nodes". All nodes
are deemed malicious and untrusted. Only the decentralized independently verified
ledger is "honest". Those who wish to implement the Whitepaper version of Bitcoin,
and bring back "honest nodes" are misguided at best or purposefully destructive at
worst.  Satoshi is dead and so is Bitcoin Experiment Version 1.  We need to accept
this and create new possibilities, not fall back to old misunderstandings and old
theories that came from lack of knowledge. We have advanced much in 9 years
and we need to move forward not back. Miners are only one part of a multi part
organism in Bitcoin Experiment Version 2. If you want a Version 3 with SegWit
and/or blocksize bumps, that is fine within Consensus, but going back to Version 1
where success or failure is contingent only on a certain percentage of "honest (miner)
nodes" is very flawed and dangerous.

"They vote with their CPU proof-of-worker, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism."
- S. Nakamoto

Many who want to compromise let's find the operator.

I'm going to reply in pieces to this :)


If there is only one centralized entity that makes the single software ran by miners and nodes alike, this is the central authority that decides by writing lines of code and pushing it to the miners (and also the verifying nodes which do the same).  So, duh.  That's why a system that has only one code base is centralized in the hands of the coders.  First Satoshi, of course, and later, Core.  That's no different from Microsoft being the central authority of what windows does, or Apple being the central authority of what Apple devices do.  

The only choice left to the software user is: keep old version, or upgrade.

If everything is done by soft forks, moreover, the only thing that the software monopolist needs to do, is to convince >50% of the mining nodes to adopt the software.  Then this soft fork is imposed upon the rest of the miners (or all their blocks get orphaned sooner or later).  And the users, we don't care.  Because soft forks are accepted by older nodes (even if they don't understand them).

==> soft forks are the way for the software monopolist to keep its power if it can push its upgrades to more than half of the miner pools.

This is why this has been "working" since 2010.  Bitcoin was centralized on a software monopolist which was smart enough to use soft forks.



You (and you're not alone) seems to have serious conceptual difficulties with the notion of a decentralized system.   A decentralized system has no authority, has no laws, has no government, has no justice, has, in other words, no notion of "morality", of "good" and "bad", of "valid" and "invalid".

Yes, if we were living in a decentralized society, "murder" would not have any notion of good or bad.  Like in nature, when the lion murders the antelope.  It happens or it doesn't happen.  Visibly, for the lion, killing the antelope was "good" ; for the antelope, we imagine that it was "bad", and nature being decentralized, there's no single authority to put the "bad" of the antelope over the "good" of the lion, and decide that it was globally bad.

This total absence of authority, of good and bad, and of valid and invalid, makes that the system has a dynamical behaviour.

You could say the same, in more restricted terms, of "market price".  The price, in a market, is also something that is decentralized if it is an efficient and competitive market.  There is no "valid" and "invalid" price.  There is no "good" and "bad" price.  The price is whatever the market determines, it is.

In the same way, in a decentralized system, whatever happens on the system, is what the system is doing, and that is not "good" or "bad". It can correspond, or deviate, from the PURPOSE you had IN MIND that the system WAS MADE FOR, but that's just illusion.  The system is whatever it is doing.  A "51% attack" is part of its possible behaviours, like "murder" is part of the possible behaviours of a system made of lions and antelopes.

From the moment you would like to define "good" and "bad" in such a system, you need to introduce centralization, because a single authority needs to even define what are the boundaries of "good" and "bad", and needs to have privileged force to impose this upon all its participants.   You need, in other words, a government that makes rules, judges that verify the respect of the rules, and a police and prison to punish with force, those that want to transgress the rules.

If you say "majority vote", well, a 51% attack was a majority vote !  So clearly, if you want to define the evilness of an act you will need to chose between two possibilities:

1) there is a *dynamical* way to define good and bad, and whatever that dynamical way does, is what is good and bad (= decentralized system)
2) there is an undisputed central authority that is recognized by all to say what is good and bad (the King = centralized system) and who can enforce it.

I'm just explaining that in a true decentralized system, only what emerges dynamically as "good" and "bad", IS what is good and bad.

In bitcoin (and most crypto) that's the block chain.  The block chain is what is good/true/valid.  All the rest is bad/false/invalid.   Simply because that's the fundamental assumption to be able to make a decentralized ledger.  It's in there -> valid ; it's not in there -> not valid ; the rules that make the ledger are per definition valid, and whatever other rules that are not compatible with the actual sole ledger out there are dynamically determined to be false, EVEN if they told you that they should have been valid.

The OTHER way of doing things, is: the King.  Here, the software monopolist, that tells you to use their software (because nobody else ever made anything else, or because everyone ACCEPTS the ultimate authority of the King).  The software, being in only one version, is then what determines what is good and what is bad, what is valid and what is invalid.



It IS the only power in bitcoin, and this thinking is the fundamental basis of anarchist society.  Personally, I'm in favour of it, but I measure its full implication of "immorality" (which is why I'm in favour of it, actually).  But I think most people declaring themselves anarchist don't measure this to their full extend.  It is a society without good or bad.  But my political opinion doesn't matter.  

What matters is that bitcoin is designed to be decentralized, so, without any central form of authority, and hence IS an anarchist system, if ever the code monopolist loses its monopoly.   And then this is a natural and logical consequence.  Whether that is desired, healthy, "good", "valid" or anything else with moral judgement, doesn't matter, and that's exactly the whole point of decentralization: no morality, but dynamics !

You could just as well say: "if gravity is keeping the moon on orbit that's OK, but if it makes me also fall off the mountain, I don't know if that is desirable".  Well, it is part of the *dynamical laws* because gravity too, has no "morality" or no "validity".  Whatever it does, is what gravity does.


Well, the genius of bitcoin's designer was to build a system in which the rules he laid down (as King) became or were supposed to become a Nash equilibrium, which means, that deviating from it for a single entity was not in that entity's advantage, meaning that the rules were immutable.  But it seems that Satoshi didn't understand the genius of his own design, so he still was thinking in terms of the King.

Bitcoin was laid down by its  King and his heirs, Core, as long as they are/were the software monopolist.  They are the central deciders on bitcoin.  They could even decide, like Vitalik did on ethereum, to reverse some irreversible things.  As such, bitcoin is like windows: a central software monopolist decides on everything.    They also decide, through their software, what is valid and invalid, good and bad, right and wrong.  Nobody can oppose them, because they make the only software that can run bitcoin.  There's no difference between core on one hand, and windows and apple on the other.  There are, indeed, rules of validity and of invalidity.

However, once that monopoly is gone in practice, who's going to decide what version of software is going to define what is valid and invalid ?   What is now "valid" ?  Where does that notion even come from ?

Bitcoin was designed to decide this by majority vote, majority of hash rate.  So yes, the original design exactly decided that "validity" was exactly what miners decided, by building upon the blocks they "signed off" as valid.  That's the core of bitcoin's PoW consensus mechanism.  So that's the definition of "valid".  If there are no software monopolists any more that can, also on a whim, decide this or that, because everybody NEEDS their software, then that's all that is left as a decision mechanism, because there's no central authority any more.

==> bitcoin becomes decentralized, and hence without "morals", without "good" and "bad" apart from its very own definition of good and bad: the block chain.

The question to me is: What exactly  is an  'invalid block'.  The final protocol could be very flexible here. Major rules should be: 21 Mio fix, no double spending,... ??

You see, you also think in terms of "should".   But any "should" is a "constitution" that determines what is "good" and what is "bad", and hence, that has been set up by a central entity ; or is dynamically arising, and in that case, you cannot say "should".  It is what it is.

I think, for instance, that the 21 M limit is one of the biggest stupidities in bitcoin ; others think that it is its major value proposition.  

So, essentially, the choices are:

a) central authority that can dictate whatever is the rule set.

b) dynamical happening that determines what is the rule set.

I think the whole concept of a crypto currency is that there is initially a central authority that determines what is the rule set, and that afterwards, if any claim on decentralization makes sense, that from this initial rule set, a dynamical happening follows.  

My personal theory is that the only dynamical rule that guarantees decentralization, is that the original rule set is a Nash equilibrium, making it impossible to deviate from it, apart from going back to (a).   But one could design more subtle systems in which, in a decentralized way, modifications to the rules can be made without collusion.   In fact, hard forking is the standard way of doing that, but maybe there are less violent ways to do so ; or maybe, it is exactly part of the immutability dynamics, that the only decentralized way to change something, is to hard fork.

The whole question, hence, is not so much of what bitcoin "should" do, but rather, whether it is decentralized (and hence, immutable) or whether it is centralized ; and if, in that last case, in who's hands is the central power.  Until very recently, bitcoin was centralized in the hands of Core, being the software monopolist, and hence the de facto master of the rules (backed into the software).  This goes in fact against the consensus mechanism in bitcoin, that puts the power to decide in the hands of those with most hash rate.  These last ones start to get aware of their final say, and it is no wonder that both are fighting - but this exact fighting is exactly what is to be expected in a decentralized system, imposing immutability.  So this would point finally, to the observation that bitcoin is starting to get decentralized from Core.  We'll see.

Note that jbreher is perfectly right that a valid block is simply by definition, that block on which miners decide to build the rest of the chain.  And implicitly, hence, that the valid protocol is the protocol that considers that block as valid.  Whether that corresponds to any white paper or not !

If tomorrow, all miners start mining blocks in which the block reward rises to 200 BTC, and they build blocks on one another, then the bitcoin protocol has de facto changed, and is now such that block rewards are 200 BTC.  Because miners built on top of such blocks, so they decided collectively that that was the valid protocol.

This directly contradicts the text of the whitepaper-- which specifically talks about an attacker overpowering with invalid blocks:


But more importantly, it contradicts the behavior of every version of Bitcoin ever released, including all those released by Satoshi. It also contradicts the behavior of every blockchain like altcoin that I'm aware of.

Yes, the white paper was still talking in terms of absolute rules (this is why I said that Satoshi did a genius invention, and didn't realize it himself), in terms of what the King decided, and had hence an undefined notion of "honest".  His "to accept alerts from the network nodes if they detect an invalid block" is actually a poor way of killing the consensus decision process by a "vote by majority of nodes" which can easily be Sybil-attacked, and which was the original reason to base consensus upon PoW and not "vote by node" !

Satoshi didn't realize that the immutability and the consensus mechanism he was thinking applied only to the HISTORY of the block chain, was also the mechanism that decided about the protocol.  He thought that he, or his heirs, would remain the central deciders concerning the "laws of the system" (the King and its aristocracy that can dictate the law, say), but that the users of the system including the miners, would be subject to a game-theoretical decentralization, which would keep them on the Nash equilibrium of the rule set the King and his aristocracy decided upon with their de facto software monopoly that contained the Law.  This is why he talked about "honest" nodes, that is to say, nodes that run correctly HIS software with HIS rule set.  So Satoshi was still thinking as himself or his heirs as the central deciders about what is valid and what is invalid, and impose it through their software.

However, the consensus mechanism (the genius invention of Satoshi) applies to EVERYTHING, not only the binary data of the block chain history, but to the protocol too, if the software becomes decentralized too and the central deciders lose their power.

But what you say is evidently not true, in the following sense: suppose that I have 10 times the hash rate of the network under my thumb without anyone knowing, and tomorrow, I fire up my hardware and I orphan the last 100 blocks and replace them by 200 empty blocks (rewinding all the transactions of today).  I can produce 200 empty blocks simply because of my hash rate.  Suppose I keep on mining these blocks for the next 10 weeks.  I will have outpaced all others.  I will have made by far the longest chain with the most PoW.  Difficulty will have gone very high.  All software that is running bitcoin, including all miner software, will mine on top of my blocks after that.  The transactions have been rewound because the only growing block chain is the one which is the "true history" by definition.  The orphaned blocks containing the "real" transactions are now considered non-existing or false blocks.



Of course, but that is exactly because there's a software monopoly (in alt coins even more than in bitcoin).  So evidently, the single software running out there cannot contradict its very own protocol, so with a software monopoly defining the protocol, this situation can of course not happen.

The whole point is that if there is a single block chain out there which has a modified protocol, and if miners all agree amongst themselves to continue mining that chain, using whatever software to do so, then that modified protocol is the true protocol of bitcoin, or of whatever you want to call the coin that goes with it.   If miners are not bound by the central software decider, they are the deciders of the consensus, not only concerning the transaction history, but also of the protocol.

The whole difficulty for miners is to come to any other agreement than the current protocol, because the current protocol is, for them, a Nash equilibrium.  If they know that all their peers are bound by the software monopolist, they can simply follow, and the software monopolist is the true central decider of bitcoin.  But if they are not certain that their peers will run all the same DEVIATION of the actual rule set, then the current status is a Nash equilibrium out of which they cannot escape, unless they collude themselves to decide upon something else.  In that case, their cartel is now the new central decider on bitcoin, because the software monopolist lost its monopoly.  

EDIT: BTW, one should make a distinction between two different notions:

a) hash rate majority
b) hash rate consensus

Hash rate majority can impose history modifications (the famous 51% attack) and protocol modifications that are soft forks onto the entire network.  A typical soft fork imposed upon the network is a blacklist of addresses.  If a majority of hash rate decides to blacklist addresses, and orphan blocks that contain those addresses, then this black list is imposed upon the whole system.

But hash rate majority cannot impose various protocol changes which are hard forks.  This leads us to:

Hash rate consensus.  Hash rate consensus is when all miners accept one-another's consensus decisions, that is when they make one single chain.  Apart from timing problems and accidental orphaning, they accept one-another's blocks and build on top of them.  This hash rate consensus is what I'm talking about when I say that it also determines protocol.

Hash rate consensus can be broken, when a certain part of the miners decide upon one protocol or history, and another part decides upon something else.  Obviously, this can not happen if there is a software monopoly !   But if there is no software monopoly, such consensus breach can happen.  If miners split in two or more groups, and only recognize their peers' blocks as consensual, we simply have a forked chain.

When there is hash rate consensus, the emerging protocol is the "valid" protocol, whatever it is.  If there is no hash rate consensus, there is a fork in the chain, and users can pick one or both of the prongs to do things with, like transact on it, or consider received transactions on it.   When there is hash rate consensus, there only being one block chain out there, there' s nothing else.

==> you see the error in your reasoning: it is not because Satoshi "attempted to create" something, that the something he created, will behave the way he intended it !  Taking the desired outcome of a design as a logical consequence of the functioning of the design is a known error which happens frequently in discussions about bitcoin.


I think you're slowly getting it.  The public proofs are not to "show that the miners behave well", but only are there to prove your transaction to someone else, in order to obtain value against it (an IOU on an exchange, drugs on a dark market, whatever you want to use your transaction for).  Because if you, as a user, owning a lot of bitcoins, are not happy with the single ledger out there, and find that that single ledger is not built according to how you think it should be built, then you have only one single option: leave your bitcoin holdings for what they are, and go farming or sailing and forget bitcoin.   
Indeed, the ONLY MEANS you have to obtain value against your bitcoin holdings, of which the sole proof resides in the sole chain that is being made out there, is for that single chain out there to record your transaction, with the hope that the recipient is going to be willing to consider it as valid.  If he doesn't, you've simply lost your coins on that chain.  If you don't consider that sole chain as valid, you're foregoing your "right to spend" of your coins, because it is the only place where you can spend them.

I know that Satoshi *intended* it otherwise, but that's how the system that he designed, is designed to behave.  This is because Satoshi saw the whole network as mining or at least, as the miners embedded in a P2P network.  But if the mining nodes are not very numerous, and have a backbone connection, then the P2P filtering doesn't affect them in their building of a chain.

So essentially, if "users" on one hand, and "miners" on the other hand, are united, and miners make only one chain, and users refuse that chain, then:

1) users forego all their rights to spend, as if they didn't hold any coins
2) miners are making coins nobody will buy

I think SOME users will give in first.  Because they are more numerous (millions against 20) ; because they have individually no cost in "leaving their camp" (while miners do, especially with the very slow difficulty adaptation of bitcoin).  Users remaining united against miner consensus is a "tragedy of the commons": the user that switches behaviour WINS (can buy cheap coins from miners and can transact!).  The miner is in a Nash equilibrium with other miners, and forking off is expensive for him (his chain may not survive).

Game-theoretically it seems quite obvious that "united users" against "miners in consensus" makes the miners win.

What is tricky, for miners, is to get into this different consensus.  There, most probably, they can only do so with cartel formation, because they are in a Nash equilibrium in the current protocol.  But we are talking about the hypothetical clash between the miner protocol and the user "verification". 


No, that's not what I'm saying.  I'm saying that a dynamical system behaves the way it is observed to behave, most probably according to the emergent properties of the dynamical laws of its constituents, and NOT according to some pre-conceived ideas from how it SHOULD behave because it was the DESIRE of the founder or something.   I'm not saying that there are no true laws of gravity.  I'm saying that the laws of gravity are whatever we observe gravity to do, and even if we would think that gravity SHOULD behave differently for moral reasons, that's not necessarily going to happen.

In other words, bitcoin has dynamical rules built into it, which are game-theoretical and cryptographic/techical.  These rules will determine how bitcoin will behave ; and not some or other white paper.  That said, in as much as the author of the white paper correctly estimated the emergent properties of his design, that design will work as designed ; and in as much as he made mistakes, his opinions don't matter, but the real behaviour does.  Real behaviour which must find its explanation in the behavioural rules of each of its entities, as confronted to the "rules of engagement" (cryptographic and game-theoretical).  Whatever results from these interactions as emergent property, is what we call bitcoin's behaviour, and hence, the "valid" way in which bitcoin acts.


This is not necessarily true.  After all, are you really going to say that if miners start mining 20 MB blocks tomorrow, that nobody is going to value a bitcoin any more ?  The value of bitcoin has only to do with the belief in the value of the buyer of the coin. 
Do you think that big owners of bitcoin are going to let their stash become worthless, because some or other protocol changed ?  Of course they will try to convince greater fools to buy their coins, exactly like they are doing right now.

That said, you are right that miners will be sensitive to the valuation of their block rewards (coin value times how many of them they can obtain, fees, and block rewards). 
In fact, if they would estimate that the price of a coin would divide by 10, but they would be able to obtain 20 times more of them, that would be a smart move on their part, doubling their income.

But it would be difficult for them to make that move, because they are individually locked into a Nash equilibrium with the current protocol.  Only cartel formation would let them do so.

Well, in a decentralized system, the rules could be anything. The miners have the power to set them to what ever the majority of them want. We, the users, merely have the power to either participate or not participate.

As for me, the two rules you mention are indeed dealbreakers for me. If ever they become violated, I will not participate. As would, I imagine, the vast majority. Which is the only power offsetting the miners' greed.

So far, so good on that point. And I imagine shall always be.

No, Gregory, your whitepaper quote does not contradict the notion that blocks that are built atop are the very definition of block validity.


Not at all. Are you saying that there are invalid blocks included in the blockchain at this point? Manifestly this notion is untrue.

Maybe he means the "scrubbed" version of the whitepaper (http://themerkle.com/blockstream-wants-to-rewrite-the-bitcoin-whitepaper/ (http://themerkle.com/blockstream-wants-to-rewrite-the-bitcoin-whitepaper/)). And LOL that gmax is suddenly the person "staying true to Satoshi's vision"...

First, I'd like to point out that you once again take small paras where I state nothing
of any value and address those instead of attacking my main paras directly. Instead
of arguing where my reasoning is wrong, you just argue simple statements I make in
passing or in the preamble.




The purpose of Satoshi's client, and today's client (Core), was that there was a baseline
standard rule set that all other clients and systems could rely upon. That is why it is
considered the "reference client" (Dev Gavin understood this very well at the time).
At some point in the future, the reference client will never again be changed unless in
emergencies or serious bug fixes. The rules will be set in stone forever. Simply,
eventually the system will not need additions or etc since everything could be done
without needing direct modifications to the protocol. If the rules are changed after that
future point that are not to fix serious issues, it is always an attack on the base rules.

Satoshi intended the reference client to be "the center", because that is how all systems
within this universe work. There is no simple or complex system that exists that has no
center point. Your belief that this may be a problem (since 2010) is not the fault of
Satoshi or Core or the limitations of the human mind, but the limitations of this universe,
and because of that, your argument is distraction and is a waste of time. Thinking that the
reference client needs to also be “decentralized” is a perversion created from blind hate
and not logic. Satoshi understood there would always be a reference client that all other
system would build from and he understood that at a certain point that client would never
need changing (this contradicts emergent mechanisms).

There must be a center always, there is no long term stable system with two centers.
Even with galaxies or black holes which circle the other, one or both will always be
obliterated. Even if Core Client is supplanted by another, that new one becomes centralized
and then your argument continues ad infinitum. There will always be rules and they will
always be dictated through a single center client. That is natural. The protocol must be
represented in physical form and that form is by the reference client. Competition with
such system is not healthy, that is a human delusion, competition over time is slow
erosion/destruction. If you do not like it, you must change it from within the system,
not from the outside by competition. Your faith in human markets will be your ruin.




Your definition of a "true decentralized system" does not exist in this universe.
You are talking in philosophical ways that does not apply to what we are actually
dealing with in Bitcoin. We learn nothing from your statements other than your
personal philosophy of life.

This is not Bitcoin and never was. It can not be its future either, since that would defy
our reality now. Your definition of "decentralization" is comparable to the word "death".
Everything you listed also exists within the term "death" and what "death" may be.
Your definition of a “true decentralized system” is not what Satoshi was designing. He did
not want what you outlined because Satoshi was smart enough to understand that what
you outlined is philosophical garbage designed to argue things that are malicious and yet
portray them as a nature state. In reality, they defy our known rules and Bitcoin reality. 

When you consider Satoshi to be like a “King”, that is an incorrect representation. Satoshi
was a “clockmaker”. He set the gears and wound the key, he then left us to see how the
clock would operate based upon the gear design and rules he preselected. If you don’t like
that he selected rules that we must abide by, and instead you want to create your own
rules, even rules based on the will of the miners or markets, you are destroying Satoshi’s
clock and creating a monstrosity where everything becomes an illusion.




I disagree with your thinking. It is much more complicated that how you convey it.

The reference client is the singularity that which our universal laws are based upon.
When you make arguments that the singularity is "the King" or etc, it is a lack of acceptance
of your position with this universe (or the Bitcoin system). You don't like your reality so you
wish to change the singularity. Satoshi intended the reference client to be singular and
contain the rules.

The truth is that your viewpoint is maladjusted. You do not understand what
decentralization actually means within Bitcoin. You have taken it to an extreme that
doesn't even actually exist within this universe and a way that Satoshi didn’t want.
Satoshi envisioned the reference client to be frozen at a certain point for security
reasons. Bitcoin has nothing to do with governance; it is a digital currency first. Your
desire for change and emergent mechanism is governance based, not currency nor
security. You wish to make Bitcoin a political governmental system, instead of an
asset that was in opposition of the current financial worlds political governmental
cohort.  You advocate subversion of one of the last special things in this world.
Almost all other things have become fully corrupted. Bitcoin still holds though.




Anarchism can bugger off. It has nothing to do with what Bitcoin is or it's
decentralization. 

If anarchists wish to use the token for their own personal beliefs and etc, that is fine.
But if you wish to change the system into something that is not sustainable, just to
prove your personal beliefs are valid to yourself and society, that is an attack on the
current system, whether in your mind attacks exist or not. The truth is that you have
perverted what Satoshi wanted.

If Satoshi wanted to create an anarchistic governance model in Bitcoin or have a
decentralized reference client he could have done so by creating three systems with
three different rules and required that the network’s miners always have the 3 in
competition at all times as per the rules of block building, where the 3 groups could
control their own rules and compete to gain majority over the 3 to determine the current
rule set for a set time interval (possibly till the next halving time). Instead, Satoshi
specifically stated he only wanted one main client and was opposed to having two or
more.  It created an unstable system and he clearly understood that part.

Your beliefs and desire leads to Bitcoin's destruction. Continuing to argue that Bitcoin
isn't supposed to have any center is wrong and was never true. In fact, that is impossible.
You wish to change a working system to test an impossibility that Satoshi specifically
didn’t want to manifest due to the problems it would cause.




No, you are incorrect as usual. You live in a maladjusted parallel world.
Bitcoin was not designed to determine valid or invalid by majority of hash rate.
The rules of valid or invalid are already encoded with the protocol, miners follow that.
Miners either are in compliance or are in violation of that rule set. You are rewriting
history.

What you are talking about is a system that has no rules since the rules are always
in a liquid state. That would be consistent with your anarchist beliefs, so it is no wonder
this is your argument type. Satoshi never intended this, in fact he specifically stated that
Bitcoin would reach a point where the reference client would never need changing, thus
the rules are set. That fact alone contradicts your argument that Satoshi intended "Miner
voting" into the future. This is a lie crafted to subvert Bitcoin and weaken it's security. 

Your argument is philosophical, contradicts universal laws, and is destructive to the
actual system Satoshi tried to design. Though it was not as perfect as he intended, with
patching and other things, the system still runs effectively and proves his overall argument
(though with some currently unknown elements, it could be entirely autonomous and sound).
You on the other hand are arguing things that will never be because if they did come true,
the system would just fall apart. You want human market intervention and redirection
of the protocol itself.

Your argument is just blind idealism. Again, you never address any of my points, only my
passing simple statements and then you pontificate upon your political ideologies.

Did you even read what I am writing beyond your simple sentence quotation of
mine? Is your only job to deflect what my full argument is, while not addressing
my specifics? Very plainly again: Satoshi created valid and invalidity, this is a fact
from day one rules. Without acknowledging that, everything else you are saying is
garbage. When I say “attempted to create”, that is not an admission that Satoshi
failed in his goal to establish validity and invalidity, that is absurd and it is plain
that Satoshi succeeded in that goal, otherwise the whole system wouldn’t have
functioned past day one.  Miners defer to the protocol. Very plain.

I do not understand why you would even bother to respond in such a way since it
is so empty and worthless to the larger argument.  Instead you resort to philosophy
and word games. What the real error is that you think what you're saying is actually
worthy of contemplation.




Lol. Thanks for telling me I’m finally getting the point I have been making since I
participated in this thread and thanks for taking a small section of my argument
again and only addressing it in a superficial fashion without directly explaining
anything. You just say anything without backing it up. You take snips here and
there and only address superficialities and ignore the complexaties.

The blockchain is not simply for users, since that would be redundant in your
argument (which is clearly oblivious to you) it is for proof of block/tx/protocol
compliance by all parties.  As I stated prior, and is now clear why you didn’t quote
that part of my response, is that your understanding of blockchain is that of a
simpleton. If you think the blockchain is only for Alice to transact with Bob, then
you need to think about the blockchain more. As I have already stated, if your
argument was correct, the blockchain is not needed and thus users wouldn’t need
it for proofs, the miners would perform all that privately amongst themselves and
certify to each individual user. So by simple deduction from your argument,
blockchain serves a larger purpose then you wish to accept or purposefully
ignoring.

Your argument centers around Miners being trusted and left to determine validity
without rules and then you complain about centralized reference client? You
contradict yourself constantly because your argument is not yet fully formed or
because you are a paid/unpaid entity designed to spread worthless garbage about
Bitcoin. Since majority of your argument are in favor of miner totalitarianism, as
well as past statements about how the miners graciously perform actions for us,
I would conclude that you work for or are a miner who is a disinfo shiller and not
a true forum member trying to understand the system we participate in. Your
agenda become apparent the more you attempt to explain your belief. Your
anarchism in conjunction with totalitarianism is very confused.




To the contrary, in Game-theoretics, the Miners must follow the money, so
“united users” have more power than you are willing to entertain. It is basically
the same theory as to why people form "working unions". You are purposefully
disregarding that in order to make a conclusion that doesn’t follow normal logic
or past historical world events. It would have been better for you not to even
argue this position since history clearly shows why the opposite of your conclusion
comes about.  If a sizable amount of users with exchanges decide to boycott and
unionize, the miners will be forced to follow or fire all the users and get new users,
lol. So, this is inevitable whether you see it or not. All the paragraphs you wrote
lead ultimately to a blatantly incorrect conclusion because of your bias and
wishful fantasy.




I disagree. The miners are currently not in a Nash Equilibrium. You assume this
and so does the human markets, but that is not reality. Nash Equilibrium can not
exist if the PoW algo is allowed to be exploited from different angles. Nash Equilibrium
between the miners assumes they are playing by the same rules, and by your logic,
there is no rules other than what the miners decide. So over all, your argument is
disjointed and performed in a shotgun fashion. You will say and argue anything in
order to facilitate your end goal which is to misrepresent what Satoshi tried to do
and then change it into a ponzi scam controlled by human markets who will very
easily and quickly destroy the novel aspects and replace them with government
insurance and regulation as it’s new security mechanism.

If a miner can compel other miners (by being their hardware provider), or is using
secret exploits to the PoW that other miners are not aware of, the Nash Equilibrium
theory is an illusion. It can only be valid under my argument type in a patched form,
yet you are now arguing its existence is in effect now, which also contradict your
original argument.




Well good thing Bitcoin is not a dynamical system and Satoshi tried to prevent
that. So your argument is even worse that I assumed it to be.

What you are saying is that the nature of the beast is contingent on the nature
of the beast at different points in time as well as based on whether that beast has
been mutated by outside means. That is not Bitcoin, that is ever-changing
amorphous intangible fantasy. Nothing in this universe fits into the mold that
you have crafted. That has never been Bitcoin and Bitcoin is no where as dynamic
as you are attempting to portray.

In fact, everything that has occurred so far, besides a few issues, has occurred as
anticipated and predesigned. There have been no major surprises that proves that
Bitcoin is itself evolving or dynamic. That is what you are trying to do with things such
as “Emergent Protocol Changes”, but the fact is Satoshi did not design the system to
do that. Satoshi was against that which is pretty clear by all the things he did to prevent
dynamic aspects. The only thing that is dynamic in Bitcoin today is the fee market, which
only exists currently as a block attack vector mitigator. Otherwise dynamic aspects were
purposefully denied by Satoshi for inclusion, as evident by all the OP Codes he removed.
Not even Ethereum can be held to the misrepresentation you have spoken. Bitcoin is a
simple experiment in online currency, not governance, that is a modern day perversion.
Governance is not and will likely never be “dynamical” since that is more dangerous than
you have clearly contemplated.

Ultimately, Satoshi implemented rules. You do not like these rules because it does not
fit within your personal world view and belief how Bitcoin should function. If you wish to
change this, you need high Consensus from the ecosystem. Your argument is of a new
Bitcoin experiment which has not occurred yet, and IMO likely will never occur since it is
not commensurate with a secure decentralized unregulated digital currency.





Yes, I am going to say that. (20MB Blocks alone may be fine by 2030).
Unless the system as a whole can balance and still maintain the current
decentralized and unregulatable network security it has today, then a 20MB
chain is a failure. Transactions and utility only comes from its ability to resist
the control of the network by governmental institutions or large attackers.  
“Perceived value” is what Satoshi was against. The value comes from the utility
space that it fills in society. If you destroy it so that it mimics current payment
systems that already exist, like paypal, then it will fail since paypal is a superior
product. Bitcoin is only superior now because of what it is already doing that
others are forbidden by law to do. If you harm that to prove human ideological
or philosophical armchair theories, then you are the greater fool and you are
already prepared to eat your own shit token.

The Bitcoin system and the blockchain that it relies upon is not needed if we
are dealing with illusionary value, we can just go back to fiat and credit. The
experiment was currency valued by its ability not to be directly manipulated
by changing the rules after they are set. The static rules are the value. The
financial collapse in 2008-2009, which “inspired” Satoshi, was because rules
were not concrete and were changeable. Your argument is to change those
rules, in fact, you want them to be an emergent and a dynamic system. That
is a spit in the face of Satoshi and is nothing that Satoshi wanted.

The Miners will always follow the Users and Exchanges in majority of the
possible outcomes. You never once outlined why my reasoning was incorrect,
instead you just state your wishful thinking and blind support of obvious
attack vectors of the network’s security and future. You are not concerned
with truth since you live in a parallel world were truth is only in the eye of
the beholder, and your eyes see nothing but devastation, which you wish to
bring to Bitcoin.